


Not like the movies

by LeDiz



Series: The 48: Farscape [3]
Category: Farscape, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Crichton is confused, F/M, Little bit of angst, Post-Peacekeeper Wars, also angry, as usual, body-switch, no escaping destiny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-23
Updated: 2016-07-27
Packaged: 2018-07-26 05:49:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7562785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeDiz/pseuds/LeDiz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After shopping for a toy for his son, Crichton wakes up in an army base, surrounded by people calling him Colonel Cameron Mitchell. He did not sign up for another mind-screw, thanks all the same.</p>
<p>Too bad there are people with other plans.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Crichton opened his eyes, taking quick stock of the situation. He was lying on a clean linoleum floor. The hand he could see in front of him was coming out of an olive green sleeve rather than his leather coat. But in the other hand, he could still feel the bauble thingy that the trader had been trying to sell him.

So. Potential situations were: hijacked into slavery and/or capture and changed into new clothes; the bauble thingy had actually been a vid-game and he was starting at level one; magicked into another dimension; this was all in his head and he was lying unconscious while the girls probably blasted those traders’ heads off. Fan-freaking-tastic.

“Mitchell?” a voice prompted. Mitchell. A name he actually recognised. There was something that didn’t happen very often. “Cam, can you hear me?”

He looked as far around as his eyes would let him. There was a blonde woman in shapeless blue smock and matching trousers crouched beside him. “Where am I?”

“Still in the base,” she said, offering him a warm, sisterly smile. “Wouldn’t you know it, the one time you touch something in my lab and it causes you to black out. If only General O’Neill had gotten his lesson so quick.”

He stared at her. Sebaceans usually had accents varying between street Aussie and well-bred British. But she sounded very American. He got his hands under him and started levering himself up.

“Hey, whoa, take it easy,” she said, but she helped him turn and sit, and the hands she put on his shoulders felt steadying rather than confining. “We don’t know what happened to you. I’ve called a med team, so just… hang tight, okay?”

He stopped in the middle of rubbing his face to look at her again. “Hang… tight?” He’d maybe heard that phrase twice in the last few years. It was the kind of slang that didn’t translate in most languages.

“Yeah, we’ll get someone to look at you, and then figure out what happened,” she said, and ducked her head to try and get a better look at his eyes. “How are you feeling? That was a pretty nasty fall, to say nothing of how suddenly you blacked out. It’s weird, I must have touched that ball a dozen times and it’s never done anything to me. Do you still have it?”

He slowly lifted the bauble up to where they could both look at it. It didn’t look particularly special. Just a nicely carved rock that… didn’t match the markings he’d been looking at just before he blacked out. He blinked, and then frowned when the woman used a pair of tongs to lift it out of his fingers. He watched silently from under furrowed brows as she stood up and took it over to the table.

They were in a small lab.

A very… human looking lab. With computers and microscopes he recognised, as well as paper and clipboards. There was a white board on the wall. He looked down at himself, and saw he was wearing the same shapeless outfit as the woman, only his was army green. There were patches on their biceps, and he pulled at his sleeve to get a better look. SG, and a large ‘1’. _English_.

“Okay, Colonel Carter, we’re here,” another American voice announced, and they both looked around to see several people bustle through the door wearing lab coats and more army gear. The lead was a dark-haired woman with soft eyes, and she gave him a direct look. “I see you woke up, Colonel Mitchell. Any dizziness? Are you sore at all?”

When they started toward him, he scrambled to his feet and skittered backward, extending a hand toward them. “Back off.”

Everyone in the room froze, and he took another step back, suddenly aware of the lack of exits.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” he muttered under his breath. “Three times is getting to be a joke.”

He’d closed the wormhole between Earth and Tormented Space, and as far as he knew, the one in the PeaceKeeper territories was still undiscovered. Not to mention the fact that last he remembered, they’d been in the middle of the Uncharted Territories—and aboard Moya, who still fought to avoid wormholes like the plague. There was no possible way for him to be on Earth.

He supposed he could be on a planet that used something close enough to English to have the same alphabet. That tiny backwater place he’d visited his first month on Moya had used a language so similar to his that they’d been able to understand him perfectly. And Noranti’s language was pretty close too, according to Livvy. Close enough that they could converse just fine.

But be damned if these people didn’t sound like they came straight out of the mid-west.

So this was probably all in his head. The scarrans were still scared he was going to blow up the universe, so something this convincing had to be… Maldis, maybe?

“Colonel Mitchell?” the new woman asked.

When his only response was glaring at her a little more sharply, the blonde added a gentler, “Cam? Everything okay?”

“Who are you people?” he demanded. “Where am I?”

“You don’t recognise us?” the blonde asked cautiously, and at her glance, one of the newcomers disappeared out the door. “Do you know who _you_ are?”

“My name is John Crichton,” he snapped, and the three people in the room stiffened very slightly. They exchanged quick looks, and he finished backing into the far corner, wishing there was something in the room more useful than a pen and lighter than a microscope. Something he could defend himself with. “And I am not interested in playing games. So you’re gonna tell me who you guys really are and what you want. Maldis? You wanna come out and play? This _better_ not be Einstein!”

“Okay… John,” the blonde woman said gently. “I can see you’re a little confused.”

“Oh, lady, confused is not the word,” he spat, baring his teeth at her in a nasty grin. “Confusion and I are old pals. This, what you’re seeing here, is what we call _anger_. Extreme, insatiable anger.”

“Okay,” she said again, lowering her gaze and raising her hands. He recognised the body language – it was standard issue negotiation training. He’d sat through about three classes of it, and watched many, many shrinks use it, every time he found (or thought he found) himself on Earth. “Alright. You’re in a facility underneath the Cheyenne Military base. More specifically, my lab. I don’t recognise the name Maldis, and as far as I’m aware, Einstein was a physicist –”

“E equals MC Hammer, I _know_!” he snapped, and she raised her hands again. The woman in the lab coat took a step forward until he switched his glare to her. “Names, people. You want this little game to fly, you’re gonna have to do some world building. I’ll give you some credit for the new faces, but Cheyenne is an air force base, I did some basic training there. So come on, step it up with the new content.”

A man stepped into the doorway, big and burly, with some weird symbol on his head. Crichton pressed his hands against the wall, recognising an intention to intimidate when he saw it coming. He chuckled darkly. “Oh, come on, guys. You know enough to know about Cheyenne, you’re gonna know I’ve seen bigger and scarier than that! Hell, my best friend was worse than this guy!”

“Colonel Mitchell,” the man said, almost like a greeting. “Is something the matter?”

“I am _not_ a _colonel_!” he yelled. “I am a _commander_ , and my name is _Crichton_! I’m not playing make-believe!”

The guy quickly lifted a weird black device, and Crichton had a split-second to recognise it as a gun and duck before it went off. He felt the crackle of energy over his shoulder and swore before making a break for it, but the blonde chick got in his way. He would have just barrelled past her, but she hit the inside of his knee and his vision exploded with stars. He crashed into her, she shoved him back, the gun went off again, and he descended into blissful darkness.

 

* * *

 

 

Carolyn sighed as she put down her clipboard and pressed the intercom. “Physically, he’s fine, though I’d appreciate it if co-workers didn’t attack vulnerable parts of his physiology in future,” she added with a smirk toward Sam. “You know his legs are still prone to weakness, Colonel.”

“That’s why I went for them, on his instructions,” she explained when Landry looked at her sideways. “No, really. Mitchell made a point of telling us to hit him in the knees if he ever went crazy.”

Daniel grimaced but nodded to back her up. “Something about… better your enemy knows your weakness than you be your friend’s enemy with none. I don’t know, it was one of his team bonding days.”

Landry continued staring at them, caught between amusement and disapproval, for several seconds before going back to the viewing window and his daughter. “Any idea what’s going on in his head?”

“Uh, no, actually,” Carolyn admitted as she looked back over her shoulder. “His brainwave patterns are within reasonable limits, though he seems stressed, even unconscious. I can’t find any sub-atomic traces to account for any… I don’t know, _transferral_. This doesn’t seem to be medical.”

“So good bets are on the artefact,” Landry surmised, and turned toward Sam. “Alright, this is –”

Sudden movement alerted them all to not-Mitchell waking up. When his first move was halted by the restraints, he slumped back against the bed and began frantically looking around the lab. That stopped as soon as Carolyn stepped closer, as he yanked at the restraints again and glared at her instead, baring his teeth very slightly.

She gave him a patient look. “Take it easy, Colonel Mitchell. You’re still on base; we just wanted to check you out for any physical injuries. You’re fine.”

He said something too quietly for the intercom to pick up, and Carolyn pursed her lips but otherwise only turned to the window. “He still believes he’s someone else. I recommend continued restraints and possible sedation – he just threatened to kill me.”

“Promised!” not-Mitchell corrected loudly, then glared at the glass, chest heaving. “And that goes for all of you! You try and stick _anything_ in my head, and there won’t be a damn thing that’ll save you!”

“Thank you, doctor,” Landry said grimly. “I’ll send some airmen down shortly. I’d appreciate a report on my desk within the next two hours.”

“Yes, sir,” she said with a slight smile, and reached over to turn off her side of the intercom. They watched silently as she spoke to not-Mitchell, who threw back his head before grinding something out through clenched teeth and glaring at her until she backed away.

Sam shifted her weight a little, while Daniel let out a long breath and T’ealc folded his hands a little more tightly behind his back. It was unsettling.

Not the threat, though that had been odd to hear. As ruthless as Mitchell could be, he wasn’t really prone to such outbursts. But as unusual as it was, it was actually his expression that was strange. Mitchell wasn’t known for the fury currently etched across his face.

“Jackson, T’ealc, I’d appreciate it if you two would speak to him,” Landry said quietly. “Try and find out who he thinks he is, how he got here, and why he’s threatening my people. Carter, I want you working on that artefact. Find out what it is and where your team leader has gone.”

 

* * *

 

 

**Cam’s first night on Moya was terrifying. He spent half his time getting a gun pointed at his head by the psycho Vala-lookalike and the rest of it varying between panic and fanboying because _these aliens actually looked like aliens_!**

**But that faded pretty quickly when he found the Vala-lookalike in what was clearly supposed to be a nursery, tears streaming down her face as she rocked a child that looked like his baby pictures.**

**“The body you’re inhabiting?” the grey girl murmured against his shoulder. “Her husband. Has a bad habit of getting mind-frelled. Made her promise to shoot him if he ever lost control again.”**

**“Huh,” he said, and realised he was in something deeper than he first thought.**

 

* * *

 

 

He’d been escorted to a small concrete interrogation room, complete with one-way mirror and a couple of mindless guards. He was handcuffed and locked to a hard chair, while the big guy from earlier stood in front of a mirror and glared at him. The glasses guy from the med lab observation window was sitting opposite him, preparing a notebook and pen. It felt like a scene from a bad cop movie.

Crichton eyed the guns on the guards. They certainly looked like human military weapons, but he supposed he wouldn’t really know. His knowledge of weapons mostly reached from pulse weapons to atomic bombs. Home grown bullet-style guns were a little beyond him. “So this is Earth, right?” he asked quietly, and glasses guy looked up, apparently surprised by the question.

“Uh, yes. Yes, it is. You were expecting somewhere else?”

He just turned his head to face him, amused and not bothering to respond. Glasses waited expectantly for a few seconds, then drew a sharp breath and sat forward. “Okay then, let’s start with the basics. My name is Daniel Jackson, and behind –”

“Wait, say that again?” he interrupted.

Glasses blinked. “Daniel Jackson?”

“Daniel… Jackson,” he repeated, and swallowed, unable to stop his smile. “Okay, that’s a new one, I will give you that. You’re a little young to be James Spader, though I’d buy you as Jackson’s kid, maybe.”

“Uh… thank you?” Glasses’ head twitched slightly. “James Spader’s an actor, right?”

Crichton laughed, sitting back in his chair. “Yeah. The role I’m thinking of specifically is from the 1994 sci-fi classic _Stargate_ ,” he said, grinning when that made everyone in the room tense slightly. “Daniel Jackson, an absent minded linguist archaeologist known for his outlandish theories regarding the pyramids. You don’t really look like him.”

Glasses stared at him. “I… don’t, huh? This is a movie you’re talking about?”

“Yeah.”

“I… see,” he said, and scribbled some notes on the notepad, which Crichton noted were actually in messy but identifiable English. Nice attention to detail, he had to say. Then Glasses looked up, hesitated, and gestured over his shoulder to the big guy. “And the other… characters? T’ealc?”

“He’s a new one,” Crichton admitted, glancing at him. “Hey, big guy. Do me a favour and say the word ‘bath’.”

That earned him a silent stare from both his interrogators. He grinned back. “What? Come on, big guy, trust me, I won’t be offended if you can’t manage the mid-west. Just prove you don’t speak space-Aussie.” When they only continued to stare, he shrugged and went back to Glasses. “Well, I guess he’s not sebacean, anyway. When your guys use makeup, you go all out, not just that pretty shimmery eye shadow Big Guy has going on there. Nice headpiece by the way,” he added with a glance back at the wrestler.

“Oh…kay,” Glasses said slowly. “Um. Am I, that is, Daniel Jackson, the only character in this little… movie?”

“Big movie. Well, bigger than expected, anyway. And no, there were plenty. Jack O’Neil, Ra, Sha’uri, Kawalski…” He made a face and looked around at the guards. “You’re not gonna turn out to be any of them, are you, boys?”

Glasses’ jaw had clenched somewhere along the line, but he forced it to relax as he said, “No, no… No, none of them, unless Jack suddenly feels a need to drop by.”

“Oh, that’s a shame. Unless you want me to play the role, in which case we’re gonna have a problem,” he said brightly. “I may be a death seeker occasionally, but I need a spider bite or at least three near-death experiences before I get suicidal.”

“What?” Glasses stared at him for a second, then rubbed his forehead and tried again. “Tell you what. Let’s start this again. Who do you think you are?”

“My name is John Crichton, however I also go by Don Quixote and Dorothy Gale.”

“Uh huh.” Glasses barely even moved, let alone reacted, but still asked, “And us? Who do you think we are?”

“I don’t know. You say you’re Daniel Jackson, but like I said, I’m not getting the Spader reference unless he got a man-up haircut and spent the last ten years lifting books instead of hitting them.”

“Thank you,” he said blankly. “And the man behind me?”

He raised his eyebrows with an inviting smile. “Mr T. gone chill?”

The big guy’s head tilted slightly, unamused by the reference, so Crichton shrugged and went back to Glasses. “Next?”

“How about you tell me about this movie of yours?” he suggested. “You mentioned stargates.”

“Stargate. Singular,” he said. “Came out while I was at grad school, and my girlfriend was a history major that got off on riffing on movies. She’d pick apart the history, I’d start to pick apart the science, and then she’d stick her tongue down my throat. I got to know the movie pretty damn well, trying to find science to object to. There wasn’t much in it,” he confided, but Glasses was rubbing his temple again.

“I see. How about the plot?”

“Wasn’t much of that, either. It was a whole lotta conspiracy theory about aliens building the pyramids,” he said blandly. “Clearly a writer on board. But hey, his film, his propaganda.”

“And in a little more detail?” Glasses asked wearily. “What were these aliens?”

“Ugh. I don’t know, I wasn’t watching it for the _story_ ,” he said. “Ancient aliens used wormholes to travel the stars in giant floating pyramid tombs. Ra is actually an alien. Kurt Russell and James Spader team up to have wacky adventures, kill Ra, make Russell realise he can live on after his son’s death, show the world Spader wasn’t really as crazy as everyone thought, save the universe, whatever.”

Glasses waited, but Crichton had nothing more to add. It was almost ten years ago, and his memories of the movie mostly revolved around impassioned rants about screwed up mythology and frenzied sex on the couch. Glasses cycled his pen through the air for more. “And? The stargate…?”

He just smiled back. The reason he’d remembered the movie and the name of its protagonists so easily was because he’d spent a lot of the last three years bitching about every movie with a plot even vaguely related to the hell his life had become. Stargates made wormholes. “Watch the movie if you wanna know – I hear it’s still pretty good, all things considered.”

“Okay, this is going nowhere,” Glasses said, slapping his pen down before immediately picking it up again. “What did you say your name was again?”

“Commander John Crichton,” he said patiently. This was the second laziest interrogation he’d ever had, and this time he wasn’t worried about any of his friends. If not for the see-through attempt to learn about wormholes, he might have even enjoyed himself. “Astronaut. A member of IASA’s R and D division. Crew of Moya. Destroyer of Worlds. Most famed and wanted criminal in the known universe, though it’s been implied they’re dropping the charges,” he added to himself. He’d have to get someone to check on that when he got back. “Husband of Aeryn. Father of D’Argo. Pain in Pilot’s tendrils. How long would you like me to continue?”

But apparently he’d lost them somewhere, because Glasses was gaping at him again. “Destroyer of what?”

“Well. A couple of moons, helped with a command carrier, and I started on a solar system, but no actual worlds,” he admitted. “But I didn’t come up with the name.”

The big guy stepped forward, which was just as well because it looked like he’d broken Glasses. “Do you know the name Cameron Mitchell?”

“Only because I think that’s what you guys have been calling me,” he said, looking up at him. “But no, not especially. I did know a few Camerons growing up though. Cameron Levins tried to beat me up, first year of high school. Then he found out why you don’t mess with a smart jock.”

“Shut up,” Glasses demanded, then sighed and asked, “What is IASA?”

“IASA,” he repeated. When they continued staring, he rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, you know about Stargate but you don’t know IASA? What, are you guys patched into the pop-culture circuit or what? IASA! International Aeronautics and Space Administration!”

“You mean NASA,” said Glasses. “ _National_ Aeronautics and Space Administration.”

He snorted. “Oh, how nice to see the government in my head is a little more honest with itself! Bit more jaded after our last trip back home, are we?”

“What?”

“No more ‘working for international success in space’?” he asked. “Only interested in getting the American people to Mars?”

“Wh- no,” he said, and then sat back. “My god, this has got to be some kind of evil plot to make me appreciate Mitchell. I can’t believe I am actually missing his rants about baking.”

“Indeed,” the big guy intoned. “I would expect someone attempting to impersonate Colonel Mitchell to make some attempt of… impersonation.”

“I am so sorry to disappoint,” Crichton said, fluttering his eyelashes. “But I am not trying to be anyone called Mitchell. Or Cameron. Or a Colonel. I am John Crichton. And as much fun as this is, I’d really like to wake up soon.”

“Exactly what do you think is going on here?” Glasses asked, apparently out of exasperation. “ _We didn’t bring you here_. You are in our friend’s body! We want him back!”

Crichton smiled to himself and looked away, uninterested. He could see the play, and was in no mood to watch the world fall apart around him until he’d at least gotten to make out with a hot Ancient Egyptian version of Aeryn.

In the movie, the stargate had basically been a control collar for wormholes. Made them small and stable, allowing for near instantaneous travel to alien spaces. Clearly, he was supposed to step into this role as Cameron Mitchell, have a nice chat with their scientists about how the stargate worked, divulge all his theories and equations, and calmly hand the key to blowing up the universe to whoever his captor was.

And as much fun as that would be, he preferred to stonewall the interrogation. It wasn’t even that hard. His brain wasn’t getting sucked out of his ears, he wasn’t getting forced into sex, he wasn’t boiling from the inside out. Hell, he wasn’t even in that funky chair that stuck his legs up in the air while his interrogators melted into a pool around him. All truth told, this interrogation was lame even by human standards. Frankly, these guys sucked at it.

Besides, he was pretty sure Einstein sucked the wormhole weapon out of his subconscious, so there was nothing to really talk about.

He sat forward, making Glasses jerk back at the suddenness of his movement. “Okay, Danny-boy, let’s say I humour you and say this is an Invasion of the Body Snatchers moment. I’ve only ever seen mind-swap once before, and then we were all nice and close to each other, not a trillion miles across the Universe. How about you?”

Glasses tilted his head, awkwardly conceding the point. “This is… different than most body-swap experiences we’ve had before.”

“And this isn’t an Earth I recognise. I mean, come on, NASA? Your name is supposed to be Daniel Jackson and you’ve never heard of Stargate?” He shook his head, amused. “Nuh-uh. _Someone_ would have made the joke to you in the last decade. Unless we’re in the past, which would kind of make sense… oh, god, this isn’t the eighties, is it?”

“No, it’s not the eighties… But the past could make sense… you said that movie came out in ’94?”

He nodded. “Yeah. When I was in grad school.”

“Me too, finishing up my second doctorate,” he said slowly, then looked at him carefully. “What year do you think this is?”

“I don’t know,” he said, making a face. “I’ve started counting cycles, not years. 2004? Five?”

“Try seven,” he said. “It’s 2007. September.”

Crichton waited for the other shoe, but judging from Glasses’ expression, that had been the great revelation he was coming to. He pillowed his chin in one hand and sighed. “Does this mean I missed my son’s terrible twos? Because I was there for my nephew’s and let me tell you, I am down with that.” When Glasses continued staring at him, he flicked his other hand where it was forced to lean against the other forearm. “Being on Earth is a slightly bigger deal to me.”

“Really?”

He blinked slowly, going back over the conversation. Surely he’d mentioned that…

“Where do you think you’re supposed to be?”

Huh. Apparently they’d missed his subtle cues. But oh well, whoever his real enemy was, they’d probably know that already. So he just shrugged and said, “Somewhere else.”

“Alright,” Glasses said, and pushed back a little to point to the mirror. “Do you recognise your reflection?”

Crichton let his eyes shift over Glasses’ shoulder to the mirror, and then blinked.

He hadn’t paid any attention to it before, aside from a quick confirmation that he was a brunet human male. But now he was looking… god damn.

It was him. Still John Crichton, with brown hair, blue eyes, thick neck and even the freckle on his eyelid. Slightly shorter hair than he’d had last he checked, but still him.

It was just that he looked… healthier. Like he’d somehow managed to sleep a whole night through in the past month. Less lines and wrinkles. His shoulders were slimmer too, like he’d lost a bit of weight and muscle mass. He slowly tilted his head to the side, examining the lack of scars on his left temple, and then pulled his hands around so he could touch the back of his skull. No scar from the chip. No dents from where D’Argo had bounced his head off the floor. He looked back at the mirror, and stared at his pale, healthy face.

God, had he ever really looked this young?

“I remember you,” he mumbled.

“So it’s not your face?”

Crichton almost answered ‘not anymore’, but stopped himself at the last second, knowing it would just confuse them. So he just swallowed and said, “No. I mean, yes, it… that’s me.”

Glasses tapped his pen against the notepad. “Anything missing? Any… symbols, marks, anything?”

A life time of terror and too many deaths. “Not especially.”

“Okay,” Glasses sighed loudly. “Let’s try this: ever heard of the Jaffa?”

Crichton blinked, pulling himself away from his reflection with an effort. “Say again?”

“The Jaffa.”

“The Disney villain?” he asked blankly. “Yeah, my nephew loved those movies.”

He felt, more than saw or heard, a subtle change in the room. A kind of awkward realisation from the guards behind him, though Glasses only looked confused and Big Guy seemed offended again. He looked down at Glasses. “There is a Disney Jaffa, Daniel Jackson?”

“I… don’t know. It’s been decades since I saw a Disney movie,” he admitted.

“Aladdin,” Crichton supplied, and then grinned and cranked on the ham. “‘Phenomenal cosmic power! Itty bitty living space’.”

Glasses raised his eyebrows and silently wrote ‘rent Aladdin’ in the margin of his notepad. “What about the Taur’i?”

“Taurine?”

“Taur’i.”

“Ooh, I got this. Some kind of… bull-person?” he guessed.

“And the Asgard?”

“Thor. Viking myth?” he said, pointing at him with both hands, and Glasses let his arms drop to the table, exasperated.

“You said you’re not from Earth. So what aliens _do_ you know?”

“Lots.” He had no idea how this line of conversation could be useful to anyone who wanted to screw with him, but honestly, it was easier than dealing with a face he hadn’t seen in four years. “Why?”

“Because by identifying the alien species you’ve encountered, we can identify where in space you come from,” he snapped. “If we don’t know any of the ones you know, then you’re probably from a different reality.”

“Ooh, new theory,” he said. “Alternate realities. Shot through the wrong exit. You know what amazes me? No matter how many I visit, I’m the only one who never looks different. I’m never blue, or green, or grey. Still always me. When Einstein was doing it, it made sense, because I was trying to find something close to home, but this? This ain’t that. So what explanation do you have for this new reality where the only thing that’s different is my name and a movie?”

Glasses frowned at the onslaught of speech, then asked, “You’ve been to alternate realities before?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty Trekky,” he said. “Usually just long enough to die, of course, but beggars and choosers.”

“Die,” he repeated, then paused. “How many times have you died, Mr… Commander Crichton?” he asked, correcting himself after a quick glance at his notepad.

“That depends on who you ask. Personally, I think me still being here says I haven’t died,” he said. “Why? What’s your count?”

“Four, officially,” he said, making another note on his notepad. “The others don’t count on my permanent record.”

“ _Four_ times. Impressive number. Do tell, what’s that like?” he asked, and smiled charmingly when Glasses looked up from under his brow. “It’s something we all wanna know, you know. Bright lights? Long tunnels? Smiling gods? We’d ask Stark, who should know, you’d think, but the insanity’s kinda getting in the way of a straight answer. And even at my worst, I never broke the same way he did, so we have difficulties communicating. You seem pretty on the level, for a possibly drug-induced hallucination or magic mind-screwing, so any tips for the cross over?”

“Okay,” Glasses said, putting down his pen. “I need a break. T’ealc?”

“I shall remain a little longer,” Big guy intoned, and once Glasses had risen and started toward the door, he set his hands on the table and leaned down, intimidation tactics begun.

But Crichton wasn’t paying attention. The door had opened, and there was a familiar dark head beyond it. “Aeryn?”

“What?” Glasses asked, pausing in the doorway. Crichton stared, because the girl—woman—no, girl—peeking past his shoulder was definitely Aeryn. Pale skin, dark hair, eyes he would never be able to misplace. Looking openly… not stoic.

“Aeryn!” he shouted, shoving himself as far up as he could go. The chair caught him before he could even try to take a step, and he almost fell into Big Guy, who pushed him back down in the chair. With hands holding him down, Crichton stopped struggling to instead just gape at her.

She was in pigtails. And a simple black cotton shirt, with a green sweater tied around her waist. And she was staring at him with open concern.

Not fear, or anger, or determination. Just… concern.

“What’s the matter with him?” she asked Glasses, and he shook his head, still watching Crichton as he began gently leading her away.

“We don’t know yet.”

And then the door closed, leaving him feeling empty and aching and incredibly alone.

 

* * *

 

 

 “He’s not even trying to be Mitchell. He seems pretty convinced we’re doing something to him,” Daniel said as he slumped back in the chair. They’d convened in the conference room to discuss their next move, since Daniel was pretty sure he wasn’t going to get anywhere, T’ealc had emerged from the interrogation looking perplexed, and Sam was coming up short. “I dunno, maybe he’s trying to lull us into a false sense of security?”

“I did not feel at all secure during our conversation,” T’ealc noted, and Daniel had to give him that. Not-Mitchell seemed a few steps short of stable.

“Well, I’m afraid I’m not any help,” Sam admitted, setting the artefact on the table between them. “I’ve been testing this thing for weeks now, and today hasn’t brought up any new results. I even tried mimicking his actions leading up to the change—under supervision, of course—” she added at Landry’s glance, “but all I got was the distinct impression I was wasting my time.”

“Maybe that’s it,” Daniel suggested. “Maybe this is just some… really weird scheme to keep us distracted from something bigger.”

“Like what?” asked Landry, and Daniel opened his mouth, then grimaced.

“I… don’t know.”

“Did he show any religious inclinations?” asked Sam. “Some hint of the Ori?”

“Um… he rants a lot more than Mitchell, but that’s about it.”

“No odd voice? No Goa’uld?”

“His accent isn’t coming through as strongly. Does that count?”

“Well, what did he talk about?”

“He thinks the stargate is from a movie,” he said, and Sam blinked.

“You mean Wormhole X-Treme.”

“No, I mean a movie. Called Stargate. Early nineties, apparently,” he said, and took a slow, patient breath. “I’m played by James Spader.”

Sam’s lips pressed together, while Landry didn’t do quite so well at hiding his smile. “Congratulations.”

“Yeah, I’m… just thrilled,” he said, before pushing the next topic forward. “So, anyone have any ideas? Maybe he expects us to show him the stargate to prove it’s real?”

“Could be,” Sam said thoughtfully. “Gives him access to it, maybe sabotage.”

“It’s how I’d do it,” Vala piped up, and they all looked at her. She stared back for a moment, then extended her hands in point. “What? It’s a good plan. Simple enough to play, and stupid enough that no one would ever suspect. At the very worst, you waste a few weeks building your target’s trust. Eventually someone’s going to slip up and leave you alone with what you want. Even taking Mitchell’s body makes some level of sense, because they probably know you’re not going to hurt him. Starve him, bore him to death, subject him to a few tests, sure, but you’re not going to torture someone as important as he is. Not while the worst he’s doing is making a few idle threats.” She shrugged and started inspecting her nails. “I’m just saying, I’ve pulled off worse.”

They continued staring at her for a few seconds, before Daniel awkwardly admitted, “She does have a point.”

“So what do we do?” asked Sam. “If what Vala is saying is true, then whoever this guy is, he’s clearly in it for the long haul.”

“Then so are we,” Landry said heavily. “We can transfer him to another facility. Wait to see how long it takes him to crack.”

“And what if it’s not?” asked Daniel. “What if something messed up is happening, and Mitchell needs our help? What if he’s trapped in whoever this guy thinks he is, and is waiting for us to bring him back?”

Sam pressed her lips together again, this time in concern. The unspoken statement—the one Mitchell himself would have made if he’d been there, echoed around the silent table. Mitchell knew the risks when he joined the air force, and even more when he joined SG-1. Being stranded in another person’s body, somewhere in the wide world or universe, was a small price to pay to keep the stargate and this planet safe.

But even if he had been there to say it, he also would have been the first one to add, “I’m all for going out for a cause, but I’m not doing it if there’s another option.”

Also not when the person he’d been swapped with had so far proved himself annoying, not evil.

“As General O’Neill has said previously,” T’ealc said slowly, “sometimes the only way to avoid a trap is to walk into it.”

“What, just show him the stargate?” asked Daniel.

“See how he responds,” he suggested. “If he truly believes it is a movie prop, his reaction will be different than someone who wishes to abuse its power.”

“No matter what, we get some insight into what he’s thinking,” Sam continued, nodding as she thought it through. “If we don’t believe his act, well then at least we have something to go on, right?”

“Vala should be there too,” Daniel said, and when they all looked at him, he gestured at her. “She said it herself! It’s the kind of scam she’d pull, right? So who better than to watch him and call him out on anything that doesn’t match up?”

Landry considered it for a minute, then nodded and stood up. “Go ahead. But I want a full squadron armed and ready if he tries anything. He’s also to remain cuffed, and I want a zat gun pointed at his back at all times.”

“Yes sir.”

 

* * *

 

 

Crichton decided he had to give these guys credit for one thing. PeaceKeepers weren’t this stoic.

He’d tried all the usual tricks. When the Big Guy was doing his I-will-stare-you-into-submission routine, he’d bantered. He’d tried goading him. Commented on everything in the room. Debated the chances of a thirty-something guy named Daniel Jackson never having heard of Stargate. He’d even done the Doberman trick, staring and growling and not even backing down when the Big Guy _put_ him down.

That had at least gotten the guy out of the room, eventually. Apparently Colonel Mitchell wasn’t the growling type.

So he’d turned his attention on the guards. They proved even less entertaining, so he’d gotten bored and started thinking the situation through properly.

He’d decided there were definitely three possibilities still in play. One, these guys were on the level and he was legitimately in another reality. Albeit a weird one where the only differences were him, IASA, and a cult classic movie from the early nineties. Two, someone was screwing with his head to try and get wormhole information out of him. Whether that was through magic or technology, he didn’t particularly care, because it was still the same effect. Three, this was some kind of… test, maybe. The Ancients screwing with him to see if he’d take the bait.

So he spent a couple of minutes announcing to the world at large that he wasn’t interested. That he liked his brain with the amount of knowledge it had now, and if anyone was interested in giving him more, it had better be about how to be a good father, and/or make Aeryn appreciate the Three Stooges.

Unfortunately, all that did was further convince his guards he was completely insane. So he instead decided to consider what else had happened in 1994, and what he’d been doing when he wasn’t acting like he knew what wormholes were to turn on Jenny Cartwright. So far, he could remember lots of studying, arguing with DK, and Ace of Base.

At least singing ‘The Sign’ got a good reaction out of the storm troopers, even if it was just their audible sighs of frustration.

By the time Glasses finally come back, Crichton was mid-way through describing the Shawshank Redemption and why that prison was so much more interesting than the one he was currently in. He cut off in the middle of his sentence to smile an invitation at Glasses. “Round two?”

“New game,” he corrected, and stepped aside to reveal more guards, then nodded to the ones in the room. “Release his legs. We’re taking him to the gate.”

As he was manhandled up and frogmarched out of the room, Crichton saw Aeryn again. This time, she was watching him a little closer, so when she moved out of his sight, he tried to focus forward. If it was her—and if it was, he had to ask about the pigtails—he didn’t want to blow her cover. He just had to trust she knew what she was doing, and wait for her signal.

Big Guy and the blonde from earlier were both waiting in the next corridor, and joined their procession as they walked through a lot of very similar grey halls. He counted the turns anyway, right up until Glasses swiped a final door and they entered a massive hall, filled with soldiers pointing guns at him, and what he clearly recognised from too many hours looking for bad science.

“Oh, come _on_ ,” he mumbled, staring up at the stargate. It even had the symbols.

So… probably not alternate universe.

“Bigger than you were expecting?” Glasses asked lightly, and he gave him an annoyed look from the corner of his eye.

“Not as surrounded by Latinos wearing historically inaccurate costumes. You’re sticking with the Daniel Jackson thing?” He gave him another once-over to confirm he definitely wasn’t James Spader, then asked, “Parlez-vous Francais? Sprechen sie Deutsch? Ghe’or qastah nuq nadev?”

“Oui, ja, and I don’t recognise that last one,” he said.

“Klingon,” he said through gritted teeth. “It’s Klingon, you half-assed mind-raping moron. What the _hell_ is going on here?”

Glasses just frowned at him, then glanced off to the side, and despite himself, so did Crichton, only to flinch when he realised Aeryn had snuck up next to them. She was looking at him like – well, actually, on anyone else’s face, it might’ve looked like he was a very interesting puzzle, but on Aeryn, it just looked like she’d lost her mind.

She hesitated, then took his arm and smiled at Jackson. “Would you… give us a second? Thanks.” And then she pushed Crichton away from the guards and smiled up at him.

A real smile. Not baring her teeth in a terrified grin. Not a knowing smirk. A real smile. Crichton felt his blood run cold. “Aeryn…?”

“I don’t speak many other languages myself, so I don’t know what that means,” she said, just as quietly, and cocked her head like a bird, lifting her hand to wave a finger between them. “Just between us, is this a scam? I wouldn’t normally ask so bluntly, but um… to be honest I find myself believing you and that’s a very strange concept for me.”

He looked over her head at the soldiers, then back down to her face, and lowered his voice to below a whisper. “I need a sign, honey.”

“Sign?” she repeated, loudly, so he turned to face her straight-on.

Aeryn was not an actor. She could pretend to a certain extent, but only as far as being a PeaceKeeper and giving him respect. The more he stared into her open, cheerful expression, the more he realised… “Aeryn, wake up. I need you here.”

“Mmhm…” She folded one arm over her torso, the other propped on it so she could put a loose fist to her mouth in consideration. “So the um, the stargate. You’re… not… going to do anything to it?”

“It’s out of my head,” he hissed. “All of this is. I don’t – I don’t know who’s doing this, and for all I know you’re an illusion too, but this, the whole stargate thing, it’s from a movie. Someone is messing with my head.”

“Mmhm, mm,” she said, and then turned around so her back was to him. She whistled and twirled her finger in the air near her ear in the very human gesture for ‘crazy’, then hurried back to Glasses, where she bounced on her toes and reported, “Com-pletely off his head. Quite sad, really. I was getting to like Mitchell.”

 “Great. Just… perfect,” Crichton spat, and lifted his cuffed hands to bury his face in.


	2. Chapter 2

He was staring into the wood of the table when she entered, and didn’t look up, even when the door closed. He’d been surprisingly compliant and quiet since seeing the stargate, to the point that they’d let him keep his feet uncuffed, and dropped one of the guards.

She stood there for a few seconds, and when he didn’t look up, set one of the two cups of coffee on the table and slid it up against his fingers.

His head shifted slightly, and he looked at the cup, then up at her. “Coffee.”

“Yes,” she said, and then backed up to lean back against the mirror with her own cup. “Black, no sugar.”

He considered it for a few seconds, then gently pushed it away. “Thanks, but… I need something to make it sweet.”

“We don’t keep whiskey on base.”

He chuckled. “I’d take it, but I meant sugar,” he said, then went back to the table.

So… not a Mitchell without the military, then. There went that theory. “Daniel tells me you’re a scientist.”

“Astrophysics engineer,” he said, still staring at the table. “I used to be.”

“Not anymore?”

“Not anymore,” he repeated, and she lifted her coffee to take a sip. She found herself surprised that he wasn’t just a depressed Cam, because he did look a lot like the version she’d seen in that other world. Quiet and introspective, with that steel rod of anger brimming under the surface. It was amazing how seeing that fury in the open had changed his face.

“I’m a scientist myself. Astrophysics as well, though I tend toward the theoretical. What’s your specialty?”

He was highly focussed on his fingers and nails, pulling the skin tight as if looking for dirt in the creases. He lingered on the callouses, tried to find matching ones on both hands. Eventually, she realised he wasn’t going to answer.

“I understand. A lot of my work is classified as Top Secret. There is very little I can tell anyone about what I do or study, outside this building,” she said. “Daniel said you worked with your world’s version of NASA. A lot of space travel, I’m assuming. Cosmic theory?”

“I am not going to discuss wormholes with you,” he said, apropos of nothing but extremely firm.

She tilted her head, considering. “I never mentioned them.”

“Yes, you did,” he said quietly. “Stargate was a long time ago, but I remember how the machine was supposed to work. Wormholes through space and time.”

“Okay,” she said, and came forward to pull out the chair opposite and slowly sit down. “No wormholes. So what do you want to discuss with me? Aliens? Other worlds? Their technology? Maybe the advancements NASA has achieved so far?”

“Either you let me go home, or lock me in a tiny room with no food or water for the rest of my days,” he offered. “Because there is nothing I want to discuss with you.”

“Are you sure you want to go with that? Because most people do want to talk about it. When they find out about the stargate for the first time, they’re extremely interested in the places we go through it,” she said. “Or are you going with the angle that there’s nothing we can say that could surprise you, so we’ll tell you everything, trying to impress you, and you learn all our secrets?”

“Sure,” he said dully. “You go ahead and do that. Tell me all your theories on wormholes and how they work, until I can’t help but tell you you’re wrong. Then you’ll want to know why I disagree, and we can have a big, long, theoretical discussion on wormhole technology. I bet you’d love that.”

She narrowed her eyes, because the way he’d phrased that almost made it sound like they were worried about the same thing. Both of them thinking the other was trying to trick them into revealing technology. It was either a very good strategy or not one at all.

“Okay then, let’s skip that conversation. Let’s talk about how you got here,” she said, and took a sip of coffee before continuing. “As far as I’m concerned, Colonel Mitchell came into my lab acting perfectly normal, trying to get me to come eat breakfast. The only thing that was unusual was that today, for the first time in his life, he decided to touch something he wasn’t supposed to.” She brought the artefact out of her pocket and set it down on the table between them. “This. As soon as he did, he collapsed, and when he woke up less than a minute later, it was as you. How did things go down on your side?”

 He finally lowered his hands to the table and flattened them over the surface. “There were some traders. Travelling merchants, they said they were – seemed pretty on the level, until one of them tossed me something like this. He said it might make a nice toy for my kid.” He reached out and picked up the artefact, then held it up between them, turning it so he could see the markings. “I had just enough time to point out balls this size are no good for babies when it knocked me out.”

Sam watched him quietly, at the way his eyes took in every millimetre of the artefact, assessing it from all angles. “You have a baby?”

His eyes moved past the bauble to focus on her, and then they sharpened with sudden intensity. His fist curled shut around the artefact and he slammed it against the table, startling both her and the guard, who had his weapon halfway up before she gestured for him to back down. It was easy to understand the connection he’d probably made.

“I only asked out of interest. No one is going to hurt your family,” she said firmly. “We don’t even know where they are.” Then she let her voice soften, and she offered a small smile. “It’s interesting, since Colonel Mitchell can barely get himself a date.”

The man paused, then relaxed a little, and he gently set the bauble in the middle of the table. “I never had that problem.”

“Well, you do seem very different from him,” she admitted. “Cam is more… typical military man, if you get my drift.”

“Got a stick up his ass?” he asked, and she had to quickly close her mouth and then lift her coffee cup, vitally aware of the guard in the corner and the people that were probably watching. The man’s only concession to her response was a twitch of his eyebrow. “That’s my experience with them. ‘Show me how your research will benefit my government’s agenda, then we can talk’.”

“Th-that’s a very… bureaucratic perspective,” she said awkwardly. “I meant more that he is… well, he… he’s a man’s man. Likes video games, sports, responds to emotions with an eyes-front, jaw-locked, thousand yard stare… you know.”

 “Sounds like my friend D.K.,” he commented, and something in his eyes flickered, before he lowered his head and sighed. “God… D.K…. Jesus, I haven’t thought about him in months.”

She stared at him for a few moments, distracted by his sudden return to melancholy. “Is he…?”

“Dead. Murdered,” he said, and pulled his head back up, eyes red but dry. “’Cause of me.”

Now that was a sentiment that felt like Cam. She sighed softly and moved forward, pulling out the chair so she could sink into it. “I’m sure that’s not true.”

“No, it is,” he said bluntly. Too bluntly for her to call it survivor’s guilt. “He wouldn’t have been killed if I wasn’t on Earth. If I’d stayed away, it never…” He looked over her shoulder at the mirror, then back down at his hands. “Woulda shoulda coulda. Whatever, right?”

“Right,” she said softly. That was the sort of thing you had to understand if you were a soldi- wait. “I thought you said you were a scientist.”

“I was,” he said. “A long time ago.”

“How long?”

He shrugged, still staring at his hands. “It kind of… came on gradually. I had to have a gun to shoot the critters. Then it was just part of the masquerade. Then it was… then it was me.”

Sam found her shoulders slumping slightly, because although she’d always been military, she could recognise the heartbreaking slide. She’d watched Daniel go through it. But he had it easier; archaeology was about knowledge and extending the hand of friendship. He could keep his more optimistic side, even through all the death and pain. Engineering didn’t lend itself in that direction, most of the time.

“Listen, Maria,” he said suddenly, and she frowned.

“My name is Lieutenant Colonel Samantha Carter.”

“Whatever. Can we… can we skip all this? Not that I’m not having the time of my life, here, but if you’re trying to screw with my head, I’d appreciate you turning up the dial a bit. D’Argo in drag might be a little less realistic, but it’s just as effective and twice as fast in making me want to check out of my brain,” he said. “If you’re not going to do that, I gotta tell you, I’m really not in the mood for this slow, soap opera agony, so if I can just be sent to a padded room or locked cell, that’d be great.”

She blinked at the sudden burst of speech, then frowned. “You think we’re trying to send you insane?”

“Send? No, you’re a little late to that party,” he said. “I think Scorpy got there first, and he’s proved pretty long lasting.”

“You think you’re already crazy,” she surmised, but memories of his sudden outbursts of anger and the footage of him ranting to the universe at large paused her doubt long enough for her to meet his gaze again. “Has that… been verified by anyone?”

“Verified?” He folded his fingers under his chin and fluttered his eyelashes. “No. Not in any official capacity, no.”

She stared at him, and despite the topic, she found herself smiling anyway. It was so strange. She had no doubt that he was being a little more honest than most people were when they talked about going crazy, but there was also something… likeable about him. Especially now. Something… attractive.

He smiled back, also apparently despite himself, and they both found themselves chuckling. She could see the guard glance at her, but it was easy to ignore him, especially when she found her eyes kept going back to the other man’s gaze.

As his giggles trailed off, he bit his bottom lip, pulling it in as he looked down and then peeked up from under his eyebrows. “Sorry,” he said finally. “I don’t… well, I do mean to make things hard for you,” he confessed, and they both laughed again. This time, when he stopped, he licked his lips before murmuring, “It’s nothing personal. Just… how things’ve gotta be.”

She found herself believing him, and so leaned forward, just gazing into his eyes. He shifted a little, so his hand was cupping his chin instead of propping it up, and after a few more seconds, he raised his thumb to press against his lip.

She found herself watching the way it pressed against the skin, pulling it tight and revealing just a hint of teeth. She wondered what it felt like. Rough callous on soft skin.

Over the last few years, Sam liked to think she’d gotten to know Cam pretty well. Team leader or not, he had become everyone’s little brother; annoying Daniel, tagging alongside T’ealc, encouraging Vala and keeping Sam grounded. He was the one that kept them together, who refused to give up. Straight-laced and hopeless and over-confident and just generally… _Cameron_.

He looked like him, but this man was not Cameron.

“Crichton,” she said, trying the name on her tongue. “John Crichton.”

“Yeah,” he said, and his teeth caught on his bottom lip again as he smiled. Then he gently bit down on his thumb, pulling it between his lips for a second before asking, “Hey, um… that woman, from before. The dark haired girl.”

“Vala?”

“That’s her name?” he asked. “Vala?”

“Yeah, she’s been part of our team for about a year now.”

His thumb pressed back into his lip. He rubbed it absently, and even though it was clearly a thoughtful gesture, she couldn’t help thinking about how easy it would be for it to slip inside. For his thumb to slide over his tongue. Moist, gentle, with just that hint of –

_Cameron_. That was _Cameron’s_ thumb on _Cameron’s_ mouth.

The thought jerked her back to reality, and she quickly stood up. He blinked rapidly and leaned back, hands dropping back to the table, and it was like a spell had been broken. Sam flushed and picked up her coffee cup like a shield.

“I um,” she said, and backed up until she hit the mirror, then walked sideways until she found the door. “I need to talk to Daniel.”

 

* * *

 

“I’m sorry, what?”

Sam cringed as she shut the door behind herself. She’d found Daniel in his office, fielding Vala’s questions about what they would do if they couldn’t fix the body swap. And she could only thank her luck that they’d been together and in here, rather than, say, separate, or in the mess. Because this was embarrassing enough without having to ask twice or have the whole base overhear.

“Are there any Goa’uld that took the form of male… sex… gods?” she repeated. “Qetesh manipulated the hormones of men. Are there any that went the other way?”

“Not that I know of,” Vala said, looking amused.

“Male sex gods are rare,” Daniel said, starting slowly but picking up the pace as he thought about it. “And most of them are Greek. It’s more common for women to be seen as representations of lust, due to the widespread belief that women are the more beautiful and thereby the target of most lustful thoughts, but the Greeks were probably the most appreciative of the male form, which is why many of their lust gods are in fact male. There was Bes for the Egyptians, of course, but my thoughts initially go to Eros, Himeros, or Pothos.”

“What’s the difference?” asked Vala, and he shrugged.

“Their legends, mostly. Why do you ask, Sam?”

“It…” She hesitated, looking at Vala, but there was no help there. Sam didn’t doubt she’d figured it out already. So she sat down in the chair opposite Daniel’s and said, “When I was with John just now—”

“John?”

“The man in Mitchell’s body,” Vala explained, and Daniel jerked his head in memory.

“Right, of course. Wait, we’re calling him John now?”

“Sam is.”

She ignored that, forcing herself to keep staring at Daniel’s eyes. “We were talking, and getting nowhere, really, until he started doing this thing with his mouth.”

“Thing?”

“Mouth?”

She kept going with effort. “He um…” Her thumb touched her lips, but she couldn’t work out exactly what he’d done, so she dropped it again. “Whatever, it doesn’t matter, the point is… Look, I care about Cameron, but I’ve never been… he’s always been… Vala, help me out here.”

She paused, obviously considering messing with her, but eventually said, “Cameron Mitchell has the sexually attractive capabilities of a piece of cardboard.”

“Yes, that,” she said, then frowned. “That was a bit harsh.”

“Well, judging by the type of girl he’s attracted to, they probably find cardboard quite stimulating,” she pointed out. “To each their own, of course.”

Sam conceded the point and went back to Daniel, who was looking somewhere between frustrated and trying to block the conversation from his brain. Sam winced, knowing it wasn’t going to get much better for him. “John is… different. And that kind of thing can’t just be about personality.”

“Sure it can,” Vala said blankly. “Haven’t you ever heard the phrase ‘don’t judge a book by its size’?”

“Cover, Vala,” Daniel corrected. “Don’t judge a book by its _cover_.”

“And either way, not like this,” said Sam. “He just got through telling me he had a baby, and you said he had a wife. That’s usually a pretty sizable turnoff for me.”

“So you think Mitchell’s been possessed by some kind of Goa’uld that takes advantage of women,” Daniel surmised, and sat back in his chair to consider. “Well… sure, that could be the case. Given the rest of his interactions with us, my guess would be that he’s one of the more dangerous, or at least more unpredictable, so… probably Himeros.”

“Right,” she said, clinging to the possibility. Being subconsciously attracted to Cam was not something she was interested in dealing with. “Well, it would certainly add to the theory of him just trying to distract us. He stalled you, while everything he’s said about himself so far has been designed to appeal to me. Even his science discipline is ultimately something I’m interested in.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. Vala, do you remember if Qetesh knew anyone like that?”

“Not off the top of my head,” she said, giving Sam a knowing smirk. “You know, take away his personality, Mitchell is a _very_ attractive man. It could just be you –”

“If he’s not anyone Qetesh knew,” Sam said loudly, glaring her down, “she is someone he wants to talk to. He asked about you.”

“Me? Vala-me or Qetesh-me?”

“You did seem to put him off balance earlier,” Daniel agreed thoughtfully. “I thought it was just because you called him out on the scam, but if it’s because he recognised you as Qetesh, well…”

“Either way, I think it might be a good idea to get the two of them in a room together,” Sam suggested, and the other two stared at her. She shrugged. “What? Aren’t we working on the strategy of springing any traps he’s trying to set? No matter what happens, we’ll learn more about him and how he’s playing this situation.”

“That is true,” Daniel said slowly, looking up at Vala. “If he is a Goa’uld, he’ll either reveal himself to Qetesh, or try and seduce Vala. If not, then she can use her standard interrogation techniques and we’ll see if we can get something else out of him.”

Vala stared at him, looking a little hurt for a few seconds, before she covered it up with a smile. “Daniel,” she purred. “I had no _idea_ you wanted to see me and Mitchell together. That is quite revealing – I wish I’d known it earlier.”

 In Sam’s opinion, his double-take was a little bit priceless.

 

* * *

 

**It took all night and until after breakfast before Cam got the courage to speak to Aeryn. She introduced her son—D’Argo Sun-Crichton—and apologised for pointing a gun at him.**

**“You take it far worse than John ever did,” she commented, and he laughed.**

**“Usually when someone does that to me, I have a gun to shoot back,” he said, then grinned and added, “Sounds like you two have a complicated relationship.”**

**“We lead complicated lives.” She stared at him for a long time. “You seem very comfortable.  Are you human, in your own body?”**

**“Yeah. Even look like this guy, though I’m not big on leather, and he’s a bit bulkier than me,” he said, and shifted a little. He hadn’t been given a change of clothes yet, and he’d never worn leather pants before. They were surprisingly comfortable, but he had never been as aware of his butt as he was right now. “Most sentient creatures are, in my reality. All these aliens are kinda tripping me out. But I guess you and I are the weird ones here, huh?”**

**“You, yes,” she said calmly, and then raised a pointed eyebrow. “John Crichton is the only human this side of the universe. _I_ am sebacean. Our species shared a single ancestor species, but that was over twelve thousand cycles ago. We are now very different.”**

**He stepped back to look her up and down. She still looked like Vala, human face and all. Only difference was that Aeryn seemed to like the thing she’d given birth to. “Uh. Sorry. Can’t say I’m seeing it.”**

**“Then you’ll just have to take my word for it, human.”**

**“Right,” he said, and then leaned over to look down at the baby again. He was pretty cute, as babies went. Dark hair, blue eyes. Ten fingers that reached for his face until he pulled away. “Can’t be too different, since you made a kid together.”**

**She smiled and bounced the child a little, looking proud and heartbroken at the same time. “Yes, we did.”**

 

* * *

 

His head on the table and arms folded over his head, Crichton was somewhere between sleep and deep meditation.

Aeryn had informed him that sebacean babies never cried at obscene hours of the night and so therefore it was his responsibility to take care of his mutant child whenever Moya’s bioluminescence went down. He didn’t really believe her, but it was an undeniable fact that he was better at getting their kid to settle down than she was, so he hadn’t been getting a lot of uninterrupted sleep lately. The opportunity was welcome.

But he really did need to work out what was going on.

In all his experiences with various mind-screwing, the only time he could remember the really boring moments – the driving from place to place, the waiting, the eating, what have you… The only time he could remember these non-events was when Jack the Ancient first hijacked him. Scorpy, the scarrans, even the video game did him the favour of editing those out, and he didn’t notice because he was getting mind-raped at the time.

But this didn’t feel like Jack’s mental projection. He didn’t recognise most of the people he’d seen. The concept, sure. He remembered the movie clearly, and this whole place (stargate aside) looked a lot like the underground bases he’d done various experiments in. But that was it.

So he was trying to work it all through his brain, and since he wasn’t getting anywhere, sleep was starting to look far more attractive.

When the door opened, he jerked a little, pulled out of a dream-memory about Furlow rebuilding his module. But then he closed his eyes again and remained still. If someone wanted to bother him, they could. If it was just a change of the guard, he didn’t care.

Footsteps echoed around the room, and the door closed. It took another moment for someone to hitch themselves up on the table beside him, thigh sliding against his arm. But he still refused to react. He’d long since gotten used to people invading his personal space. As long as they weren’t courtesans or touching any of his erogenous zones, he could deal.

Right up until cool fingers slid over the back of his neck, just like Aeryn’s.

He jerked up to sitting, then blinked as his eyes adjusted.

“Aeryn.”

“You said that before,” she commented, and he blinked again. “Is that a name?”

His heart sunk a little as his brain caught up with his nerves. “You’re not Aeryn, are you? You’re Vala.”

“Vala Mal Doran, yes,” she said with a cute little smile that Aeryn never could have pulled off. “Do you know somebody who looks like me?”

He stared at her for a long few seconds, taking in everything from her hurt-bright eyes to her brittle smile and right down to the way she held herself at an angle to be appreciated by the male gaze. Chiana in Aeryn’s skin. But then he pulled back and just looked at the dark hair, angled face and grey eyes. “Yeah,” he breathed, blinking back tears. “Yeah, I do.”

“Oh. Well, if it’s any consolation, I know someone who looks like you, too. Cameron Mitchell. Bit of a stick-in-the-mud, but he’s quite fun when you get past the shell.”

“That’s… usually how it goes,” he said, and pushed his chair back so he could stand up and walk away from her. He came to a stop in the corner, then realised he was standing where the guard should have been. The guard was missing. He looked around, but sure enough, it was just him and the not-Aeryn alone in the little concrete room. Him and a sexy, flirty, happy version of his wife. “And the mind games begin.”

“Oh, goody, Sam said you’re good at them,” she said cheerfully, and he couldn’t help look over his shoulder. She was still smiling at him like this was a great joke, and it looked all kinds of wrong on her face. So he huffed out a laugh and turned to lean against the corner, hands unconsciously rising so he could press his thumb against his mouth. For some reason that earned an odd look. “Wow. You really are different than him.”

“Sorry, what?”

“Do me a favour,” she said, and flounced— _flounced_!—off the table to stand facing him. “Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.”

He stared at her blankly for a second, then complied, just to see what she’d do. She huffed like he was a disobedient child and flailed her hands at him.

“No, no, your hands are wrong. Put them together.”

He glanced at the mirror, wondering who was behind it and watching him, but did so, palms inward.

“No! Like, like this,” she said, and folded her hands, palm to back, in front of her hips. He mimicked her, and she gasped happily. “There’s Mitchell! Only… no, the eyes are wrong.”

“Oh, for the love of…” He released his hands and slumped back against the wall. “Look, I don’t know what you want, but –”

“Those cuffs are getting in the way,” she said, frowning. “You use your hands too much.”

“Stop,” he commanded, and she blinked, then smirked.

“Why should I?”

“Because I’m not this Mitchell guy,” he said. “I am not going to pretend I’m him. My name is John Crichton. I know who I am.”

“Well, that’s very impressive. Most people don’t,” she said. “Take me, for example. I spent several very good years of my life as a goddess known as Qetesh. Many more pretending to be other people, but then, she wasn’t really much of a goddess either. A Goa’uld, actually.”

“Any of these incarnations a soldier named Aeryn?” he asked. “Because that’s the only one I want to talk to.”

“You’re very stuck on her,” she commented.

“Yeah,” he snapped, raising his eyebrows. “It’s why I married her.”

“Oh, right. You’re married. _Right_. You said she was a soldier?” she asked, then did a flirty sort of curtsey before straightening up and standing at a very human version of attention. “How’s that?”

“Lousy,” he replied. Human military was very close to PeaceKeeper, but when you’d spent as long avoiding them as Crichton had, you knew the difference. Besides, she was sticking her breasts out more than her chest. “What do you want?”

“That’s not the question here,” she said, dropping out of attention to slink toward him, hands sliding into her pockets in a way designed to draw the eye. It did, but for all the wrong reasons. She smirked wider anyway. “The question is what you want. What you’re doing here. I understand, you know; getting dropped in unfamiliar territory with nothing but your wits to survive. I also understand how annoying these people can be. So why don’t you and I talk about your plan for getting out of here, and I’ll see what I can do to help things along, hm?”

He waited until she was up close and personal, leaning into his space, then shoved forward and around to slam her into the wall, his cuffed hands pressed between their torsos. He’d half-expected guards to come rushing in at such a violent display, but aside from Vala’s short gasp, there was absolutely no reaction. So he leaned in until his knuckles slotted against her ribs and their noses were less than an inch apart.

“Well,” she said, her breath slightly harsher but smirk still prominent, “this is different.”

“Let’s get this straight,” he said quietly. “Like I told your friends: I didn’t come here with a plan. I don’t want anything from any of you. I want to go home. And I’m not interested in playing games while I wait. That clear?”

Vala pulled her head down slightly, giving him a look that would have been coy on any other face. It was cute. Playful. But Crichton was used to Aeryn’s version – bold audacity that openly invited retribution. It turned him on like nothing else, but this… this cute little innocent routine was more like Chiana, and that made it a harmless game even if it was on Aeryn’s face.

It was a game he could play very, very well.

He angled his hips a little, his knee just barely pushing between hers, and leaned in so only his hands were keeping their chests apart. His nose brushed her cheek, just once, before he pulled back enough to tilt his head, hovering over her mouth before moving to the other side. As his eyes wandered back up to hers, he felt her breathing get slightly deeper, and saw the change in her gaze. Her hand rose, fingers brushing over his hip before coming to rest on his stomach. It was a familiar move. It seemed Vala was a lot like Aeryn in that way – the soft touches, the not-kisses, the promise of what could be, more than anything overt… that was what got through to women like this.

If he just moved his head, just leaned forward a little, then he could kiss her. And she wouldn’t mind. She wouldn’t mind a lot of things he could do right now.

He chuckled breathlessly, closing his eyes and allowing himself a moment of pretend. Goddamn aliens messing with his mind. They always wanted him to get laid.

But… He opened his eyes again to really look at those lonely eyes. This wasn’t Aeryn, no matter how much she looked like her. And she was too complex a construction to just pass off as a fun way to spend the time. So he just bent forward to rest their foreheads together.

“I don’t want to play this game.”

Her lips separated first, and he actually heard her swallow before she managed to speak. “Are you sure?” Her voice wobbled slightly, like Chiana’s did when she was feeling lonely. “I promise not to think you’re Mitchell.”

“You’re not Aeryn,” he replied, then pushed off to instead back up against the table. He wanted to fold his arms around himself, but couldn’t with the cuffs, so settled for crossing his wrists instead. “She’s the only one I want.”

Vala swallowed, eyelids fluttering slightly. She shifted her weight, her hands moving from her hips to her waist and back again. He could feel her wanting to reach out, but instead she pressed herself harder into the wall. When she finally spoke, her voice was quiet and almost broken. “You love her, don’t you?”

He nodded, and she tried to smile, the hand that had touched his hip rising to scratch the back of her neck.

“You know… I’m married too,” she said. “I’ve been married lots of times, but this was… real. Ish. It was an actual ceremony, anyway. I mostly did it for convenience, so I – so no one would kill me when they found out I was pregnant. But I did, you know, love him. Do. I – I love him. In my own way, at least. And – and Mitchell always says I’m not supposed to tell anyone, but… there’s Daniel, and…” She hesitated, eyes wide as she obviously thought about retracting the statement, but then admitted, “No one’s ever looked at me like you just did. No one.”

He lowered his gaze to his hands, but there was nothing he could really say. She didn’t seem to be waiting for an answer anyway, because she drew in a shaky breath before saying softly, “I’ll talk to the others. I’ll try to get you home to her.”

His eyes flicked up again, surprised, but she wouldn’t meet his gaze anymore. She swiped a hand over her eyes and hurried to the door.

For the first time since getting here, Crichton realised he couldn’t see the play.

 

* * *

 

“He was playing you,” Daniel snapped, and Sam frowned. She’d physically felt him tense when John had pushed Vala up against the wall, but that didn’t explain his sudden irritation. “This guy is a textbook empath. Reads people and presents himself in the way they want to see him. Any way to get you to believe his story.”

“No,” Vala said firmly. “No, that’s not what it was.”

“The hell it wasn’t, Vala. He plays the crazy guy with me and T’ealc because we might peg him as a harmless lunatic. He’s the flirty scientist with Sam to make her like him. And with you, he’s some lost Romeo, so you can play Juliet!”

“I don’t understand that reference!” she snapped. “Daniel, half my career has been taking advantage of love struck fools. Believe me, I have pulled the con you’re describing, and if I were to do it against myself, a long-lost love is the last act I would play. It’s far too dangerous.”

“Maybe, but it sure seems to have worked out here.”

“You can’t fake that look!” she cried, and Daniel scowled, glaring off to the side. Vala clenched her jaw, then looked to Sam for support. “He has a wife at home, a wife he loves more than life itself. And she looks like me. He hates to look at me because I’m not her. You can’t fake that.”

“Vala,” she began, because she’d met plenty of guys who could fake love. But then she stopped, because she wasn’t buying it. “I don’t know.”

“I am inclined to agree with Vala Mal Doran,” T’ealc piped up, and they all looked at him, surprised by the interjection. He was still staring into the interrogation room, where John had retreated into a corner, knees against his chest as he stared into the middle distance. “John Crichton does not act like a man enacting a complex subterfuge.”

“Of course not –” Daniel started, but a glance from T’ealc cut off any further interjection.

“He acts like a prisoner. A prisoner with something of great value to protect,” he said. “But one who has used all the resources at his disposal, and found them wanting. I believe his last option is to simply deny us. No matter who should enter that room next, his request will be the same.”

“To be locked up and left alone,” Sam murmured, and T’ealc inclined his head in agreement. She pursed her lips and slid her hands in her pockets, uncomfortable. “But what could we possibly have to gain from him? We don’t know who his family is, or where they are. We don’t even know the military department he works for. The only other thing of value that he’s mentioned is…” She paused, eyes unfocussing as she remembered. “Wormholes. He knows how to make wormholes dangerous.”

“Is that possible?” asked Vala. “I thought they were just like doorways.”

“Well, yes and no. I mean, there’s an awful lot we don’t know about wormholes, but there are all kinds of theories,” she said. “Holes in time and space which can cover immeasurable distances. Just think of all the things that have happened to us due to slight variations with wormhole accidents. Think of all the damage you could do if you actively knew how to do those things. You could go back in time, change the past to suit whatever you wanted. Collapse whole realities in on themselves. The possibilities…”

“And you think he knows that?” asked Daniel. “Sam, the guy quotes Klingon.”

“A lot of very smart people do. Elvish, too,” she pointed out, and he sighed.

“Okay. Let’s just pretend for a second here that’s what this is all about,” he said. “He thinks we’re after the knowledge of how to weaponise wormholes. We’re not. So how –”

“Well, actually… We kind of are,” she said awkwardly, and he stared.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Such knowledge would be highly advantageous,” T’ealc commented. “Had we intended for this to happen, it would be a great coup to have found John Crichton.”

“But we didn’t, and even if we had, he wouldn’t tell us,” Daniel argued. “Hell, he won’t tell us anything! Not even how to get him home!”

“Because he thinks we brought him here. Like you said, Daniel – any attempt at cooperation on his part is him just playing us,” Sam pointed out. “His reticence is an extremely basic anti-interrogation technique. The insanity, the flirting… that’s just stepping it up a notch.”

Daniel groaned loudly, rubbing his face with both hands. “Okay. Okay, so we admit that the knowledge would be very nice, but if he doesn’t want to tell us, he doesn’t have to, and –”

“Well…”

“Sam!”

She threw up her hands, and then set them both on her hips, irritated by the truth. “Look, I’d much rather have Mitchell back than know how to use wormholes like a weapon, I would. But think of the bigger picture here. And even if you can ignore that, the military can’t. If General Landry finds out about this, then he’s going to have to report it. And if he reports it, you know what side of the argument the Pentagon is going to come down on.”

“So we don’t tell him!”

“And all our security footage? The guards? You don’t think anyone who’s heard our interrogations with him will figure out what we have, even if Airman Lewis here—no offence, Lewis,” she added to the guard behind her, who smiled back. “—doesn’t tell anyone? This is not a secret we can keep between us.”

“I can’t believe that of all people on this team, _I’m_ the one arguing for us to get Mitchell back!” he cried. “And this is all hypothetical! We don’t know what he knows! I’m still pretty sure Crichton’s a certifiable lunatic!”

“Perhaps. But he is a _functioning_ lunatic,” T’ealc interjected.

The sudden whirring of a door alerted them to the fact Vala had left, and they all flinched, then looked around to see her stride into the interrogation room. John looked up at her wearily, just watching as she crouched down in front of him.

“They’re having a moral debate. They think you know how to make wormholes dangerous.”

John’s eyes narrowed, and he turned his head just enough to level a death-level glare at them through the mirror, but he didn’t say anything.

“Do you?”

He continued glaring at the mirror for a second before turning his attention back to Vala. “I’ve used a wormhole weapon before. I designed it.”

Sam closed her eyes, pained. Hell. Of all the things he could have finally given them. Now they would had to –

“You know,” Vala said conversationally. “I am what they call a very good liar. I think you are too.”

Sam opened her eyes again, furrowing her brow at John’s suddenly unreadable expression.

“And I know that sometimes the best lies aren’t lies at all. They’re not even skewed truths. It’s about not saying what matters,” Vala said, and propped her chin on the heel of her hand. “For example, I could say that I was once god of a thousand planets, desired and worshipped by billions of people. These hands controlled the fate of those people – one flick of a finger, and whole villages could be destroyed.”

John remained stoic and silent, and Vala used her free hand to brace against his knees, leaning in close. “I could say that, but the _truth_ is that I couldn’t move that finger. I was being controlled by a Goa’uld. I was the god, but only because the Goa’uld made me that way. Now it’s gone and I’m just me,” she said. “So I want an honest answer this time. Do you know how to make wormholes dangerous?”

His head moved very slightly, tilting. His lips curled, but whether it was a smirk or a sneer, Sam couldn’t tell. Whatever it was, Vala seemed to understand, because she dropped the hand from her chin to tap him on the nose, and stood up.

“What was that?” Daniel demanded, once Vala was back in the room.

“He doesn’t know anything,” she said. “He’s got a very good reason to make people think that he does, and he used to know all about it, but he doesn’t anymore. The knowledge got taken away from him somehow.”

“How do you know that?” asked Sam, and Vala just smiled.

“Because he told me that he’s done it. Now, if he were truly trying to hide the knowledge from us, then he would pretend he didn’t know anything about it,” she pointed out. “While if he didn’t know anything but wanted us to think that he did, or if he legitimately did have the knowledge, he would have said something more immediately threatening, like ‘I could blow up your puny little world’ for instance. Instead, he used a past example. He used to be able to blow up this puny little world, I don’t doubt that, but not anymore.”

“But why bother?” asked Daniel. “If he doesn’t know, why bring it up?”

“Because that is the reason he believes he was brought here,” T’ealc said slowly. “And he believes it is the only reason he is still alive at all.”

“Oh.” Daniel hesitated, glancing at Vala. “I guess that is a pretty good reason.”

“Indeed.”

Sam sighed, shifting her weight to the other hip. “Okay, so then what’s our next move? If he really can’t give us anything, then even the OUI would want us to send him back so we can stop burning tax payer funds with another reality version of Cam.”

They exchanged glances, no one really sure how to respond, until Vala shrugged and suggested, “You could try flirting with him again.”

“How is that going to help?

“I don’t know, but it sure seems like a good way to pass the time until he trusts us.”


	3. Chapter 3

**During the midday meal, the see-through lobster yelped something about wormholes, and that was all the warning they got before a man with eyes as black as the universe popped into existence beside the table.**

**Thankfully, Cam wasn’t the only one freaked out by this, and both Aeryn and Jothee responded by pointing weapons at the man’s head. He retaliated with a slow blink, and both Aeryn’s gun and Jothee’s sword yanked out of their hands to crash against the wall behind him.**

**“Do not be afraid,” he said emotionlessly. “I am not here to hurt you.”**

**“You’re an Ancient,” Aeryn said furiously. “You put the wormhole knowledge in John’s head!”**

**“Not I. But I did remove it.”**

**Cam frowned. As human as the man looked, he had read all the reports about ascended beings. None of them mentioned eyes like that. And they didn’t interfere so bluntly. He decided to place bets on this reality’s Ancients being different than his, and stayed silent.**

**“What have you done to him this time?” she demanded. “Where’s John?”**

**“He is undergoing a test,” the man said calmly, and although he didn’t have eyes, Cam knew he was being stared at. “While this man learns the material for his own.”**

 

* * *

 

Crichton stared around the surprisingly homey room, feeling vaguely off-balance. Not only had he been marched out of the interrogation room, down three halls and into what felt an awful lot like a hotel room in the middle of a military base, but Maria von Trapp over there was boiling him a cup of coffee.

“I thought Vala was the mind-game portion of the evening,” he said, as Spader stepped in front of him. “What is all this?”

“It’s late,” he replied. “We’re all tired, and we have better things to do than baby-sit you all night.”

“Okay, so, where’s my cell?” he asked.

“This is it.”

“Excuse me?”

“We’re comfortable with the belief that you don’t mean us any active harm,” Maria explained. “And we want to get you home as soon as possible. So until we can figure out how to do that, you’re being treated as an ally, not a prisoner.”

He raised an eyebrow, but his initial witty comment was cut off as Spader lifted a key into his line of sight. He blinked, and then watched warily as the key was lowered and inserted into the cuffs. He briefly considered knocking Spader out and making a run for it, but he could practically feel the zen Mr. T looming behind him. He figured he’d get three steps and wake up in a real cell, rather than this cushy hotel. So he settled for rubbing his wrists and meeting Spader’s gaze with a perplexed stare.

“Here. It’s still instant, but it includes sugar and a dash of milk,” Maria said, and he looked around and back down to see the mug being presented to him. She quirked a smile at his glance. “I guessed you prefer it white.”

“Yeah,” he said, taking the mug more out of instinct than anything. “Thanks. So uh… what now?”

“Now, you’re confined to this room until we come back at eight tomorrow morning,” Spader said calmly. “Vala’s getting you some dinner. Tomorrow, we’re going to pool our resources and try to figure out what you’re doing here. If you’d like to help, I suggest you spend the night sorting out your thoughts.”

He blinked again in response. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

And, judging by the quick smile Maria gave him, and the way everyone else trooped out of the room, that really was it.

* * *

 

**They showed him the footage, and Cam fought the urge to throw up.**

**Stargate used wormholes to _travel_.**

**“That thing wasn’t going to stop at a planet,” he said evenly, staring at the apocalypse.**

**“John wasn’t sure where it would stop,” Aeryn said quietly. “It could have been the system, or the galaxy. If left unchecked, it might have been the universe.”**

**“And it was a weapon that did this,” he said. “A weapon that uses wormholes.”**

**“Yes.”**

**His hands tightened into fists against his thighs.**

 

* * *

 

Sam, it turned out, disliked being called Maria, especially after he gave the full name version. She thought it was funny, and mentioned Mitchell had apparently called her Mary Poppins before, but she still didn’t like it.

After she found him some real milk to drink and offered to share her private stash of chocolate, he agreed to forgo the nicknames.

She and Vala stuck around while he ate dinner. “Maybe it’s something about his tongue,” Vala said when he was halfway through an orgasmic mouthful of meatloaf. “It must be a mutation.”

“Huh?”

“You and Cameron are the only people I’ve seen enjoy the food here,” Sam explained. “Most of us agree it tastes like rubber.”

Crichton gave her a direct look. “There is oregano in this. Bread. Mince. Tomatoes. I recognise all of the flavours. Eight years ago, I would have called it cardboard. Today, it’s the first thing I’ve eaten in over a year where I recognise the recipe and all the ingredients,” he pointed out. “You learn to appreciate that.”

“You don’t have tomatoes where you come from?” asked Vala. “All the planets I’ve been to tend to have the same kind of foods, just used differently.”

“Mm-mm. Sometimes things get kind of close, I mean… vegetables and fruits and meat, you know what they are, but… it’s all different,” he said, and speared a piece of carrot to hold up in front of their eyes. “This is a carrot. A root vegetable, grown underground. They used to be purple before medieval civilisation did some genetic engineering to turn most of them orange. I know this. The closest thing to this I’ve found out in space is an herb that grows on a tree on this desert planet known as Cumdergin, or something like that, my pronunciation generally sucks. It’s poisonous to most species.”

“Fascinating,” Sam commented, and he gave her the look such a comment deserved as he ate said carrot.

“Yeah, fascinating, until you discover having them on board your ship is grounds for arrest in most systems. And that was after I spent the better part of a day convincing my crew I wasn’t suicidal for wanting to eat them.”

The girls laughed, so he smiled for them before going back to his meal. Truthfully, that had been a truly suck-tacular discussion, since it happened while they had Scorpy on board and he was pretending to hate Aeryn. Chiana had confiscated his guns for a week.

“So what kind of foods do you have? Is anything bright pink?” Vala asked, and he took a moment to gauge how funny she thought she was being, and therefore how much detail he needed to go into.

“A few things. Weirdly, things usually end up looking like stuff you recognise. It just doesn’t taste the same,” he said. “But I have it on good authority that Earth food actually is some of the best. You don’t get the same kind of diversity on other planets, which limits the cooking.”

The food conversation continued until he was finished, which took a while since he procrastinated about the jello. It was bright blue and looked like the alcohol he’d been slurping on Greebus last week during Chiana’s depression-induced bender. The hangover had nearly killed him, especially with D’Argo crying all night. He wouldn’t have eaten it, except he missed sugar, so it just took him a good half hour to finish.

 By then he’d relaxed enough to start telling them about his friends. Sam was intrigued by his descriptions of the different species, and when they explained how few variations they themselves had seen, he couldn’t blame them. “Seriously? Humans are your major species?”

“We were the Ancients’ colonists,” Sam confirmed. “There are a few minor differences from evolving in different climes, but they went to a lot of effort to make similar and stable environments for us. There’s always grass and trees.”

“Huh.”

“And Earth is one of the most advanced colonies, since it’s one of the oldest,” Vala added. “The Tau’ri were mostly left alone after the Ancients left, so their technology really flourished.”

He shrugged. “I’d say that’s different, but a lot of the planets I’ve been to were visited by other species long before we were. It’s kind of hard to judge an isolated planet in the middle of nowhere against a military race raised by space explorers.”

He told them about the sebaceans – how they were all PeaceKeepers until some of them had the bright idea to split off. They couldn’t seem to wrap their minds around the fact that when he said ‘the entire race’, that included the female population as well.

“I mean, it’s great, it’s just unusual,” Sam said blankly. “Most of our universe runs on patriarchal systems.”

“I’ve seen a couple planets where women are considered the lesser species,” he admitted. “But it’s generally considered an outdated concept. My Earth is still struggling with it.”

“So backwater,” she said playfully. “Have you been to many worlds where the women are in charge?”

“Sure. Sebaceans gravitate towards matriarchies, outside the military. And there’s a lotta species where you can’t tell the difference anyway,” he added. “Mostly, it seems related to how much butt you can kick. Which is why Aeryn is captain of our ship and I’m just the eye candy.”

Sam choked on the chocolate she’d just put in her mouth, and Crichton smirked. “Hey, come on. I know I’m not exactly hot stuff here on Earth, but out in space, it seems like everyone wants in my pants.” When that didn’t help her ability to breathe, he turned to Vala, who smiled and wrapped her arms around her bended knee.

“It’s very romantic. The beauty marrying the great captain,” she teased, and he laughed.

“Well, she only became captain after the fact, but uh… yeah, kinda.”

“How’d you two meet?”

She looked so much like a lovestruck teenager that he had to laugh. “What do you mean, how’d we meet? How’d you meet your husband?”

She just grinned, so he laughed again and leaned forward to snag a piece of chocolate. “It was a prison break. She was one of the guards, I got hijacked by the prisoners, she beat my head in…”

Sam finally stopped coughing to stare at him, and he shrugged again.

“We have what you’d call a complicated history.”

“Love at first pummel?” Vala asked.

“Something like that,” he said, then smiled, remembering those early days. The first time she smiled at him. The night she started teaching him how to fight and he realised she was partly doing it for an excuse to touch him. That tense day with Gilina, when she called him ‘interesting’. That first kiss. The night in the Ancients’ illusion. What they both knew, but didn’t say for so long… “It took us a while to admit it, but…”

“Oh my god,” Sam murmured.

“See? You see what I mean?” Vala asked, and Crichton looked up, startled by what felt like a complete change in tone.

“Oh, that’s horrible,” Sam said, and stuffed another piece of chocolate in her mouth. Vala reached over and took a piece herself, something about it screaming solidarity with her fellow female. “It’s completely unfair.”

“What is?” Crichton asked blankly. “What’s wrong?”

They just glared at him, and he shifted warily, not sure what he’d done wrong.

The conversation drifted. The Goa’uld, Egypt, this world’s Ancients, and what happened when ascended beings tried to help lesser mortals. Sam even admitted to falling in love with one of the Ancients, but it had ended badly. When the Ancient descended to help her a second time, he’d had to become an ordinary thirteen year old boy. The way she talked about it, Crichton couldn’t figure out what had been worse – a thirteen year old with the memories of an Ancient, or having to watch someone you’d loved forget everything he really was.

“The people I care about never seem to come out of it very well,” she said quietly, and Vala reached over to gently hold her knee. Crichton averted his gaze, since he knew he couldn’t do anything else.

They talked about their team. T’ealc, the great warrior, and Daniel, the scholar that could shoot. He and Vala had a strange relationship, he realised – too caught up in their own issues to deal with each other’s, but clearly involved. There was also O’Neill, which amused Crichton to no end. Apparently he had a better sense of humour than he’d had in the movie. He’d been the bossman, until he got promoted out of the loop, but it was clear from the way Sam talked about him that he hadn’t gone too far from her mind.

Weirdly, Crichton had to _ask_ about Mitchell, and both women hesitated, looking awkward.

“What?” he asked. “You don’t like him or something?”

“Oh, no,” Sam said quickly. “No, that – we do. Cam’s a great guy, a good friend. It’s just…”

“It’s very strange,” Vala continued where she’d left off. “Thinking about him while looking at you.”

“Why? We too similar?”

They exchanged glances, Sam pressing her lips together in a pained sort of half-smile. “There is the looks, of course.”

“You act completely differently,” Vala assured him, but then added, “That’s what’s so strange about it.”

Crichton stretched his legs out in front of him and folded his arms over his stomach, nestling back against the bed with an amused grunt. “Well, let me guess, then. You said he was the military type, right? Upright, respects orders, that sort of thing?”

“He has Southern Charm, too,” Vala said, putting on a horrible approximation of an American accent. “Good ole’ boy from Kansas. Has horrible taste in women though. So boring,” she added blandly, and Crichton smirked.

“Jealous?”

“Hah!”

“He’s our team leader,” Sam said, as if that settled the matter, but at his look, she admitted, “And besides, he’s too… Cameron. He plays video games, for crying out loud.”

Crichton’s smirk only got wider, and Vala shrugged. “Personally, I wouldn’t mind the video games, if he didn’t always have that look on his face.”

“What look?” Sam and Crichton both asked, only to exchange smiles at the jinx.

Vala ignored it, pulling her expression into a pretty good impression of Rygel. “This is a problem I want to fix but I’m not allowed to fix it so I’m going to follow orders and not bitch about it even though I clearly want to.” She then raised her eyebrows at Sam. “That look.”

They stared at her for a few seconds, until Crichton looked to Sam, who blinked rapidly for a few seconds before jerking her head in concession. “He does do that a lot,” she admitted. “But it’s better than the one he used to have.”

 They both smiled expectantly, and she held up a hand. “No, I… I couldn’t, I…” She hesitated, then glanced back at the door before reluctantly ducking her head. When she pulled it back up again, she’d widened her eyes and opened her mouth in an excited little grin. “The planet is being threatened by explosive reality-warping aliens from the future! This is just like file two hundred and twelve only better ’cause I’m living it!”

Vala burst out laughing, and Crichton snorted, while Sam buried her bright red face in her hands and giggled. “Ohh, that was horrible. I am a horrible person.”

“Oh, oh, I’ve got one!” Vala cried, flailing her hands. When Sam finally managed to peek over her fingers, Vala widened her own eyes, jaw dropping in abject horror. “What do you mean this in an explored, peaceful planet with no chance of danger? What’s the point in going if there’s no risk of death?”

Sam buried her giggles again, and Crichton chuckled, shaking his head. “Wow.”

“He is a good team leader, though,” Sam said, once she’d tamped down her grin. “He keeps us all on track, most of the time. But he thought he was joining SG-1 as a team member, not its leader, and… well, there’s good reason for that. He’s barely old enough for his rank, and he certainly doesn’t have the experience.”

“But he has the heart,” Vala said, and when they met her gaze, it was defiant. “He does. He might be boring and a little bit mean sometimes, but Cameron Mitchell is a good man. I trust him to do the right thing. Always.”

Sam stared at her for a few seconds, then smiled and nodded. “Yeah. Me too.”

 

* * *

 

**“I don’t understand,” he said, staring at the Ancient. “Wh- what makes this John Crichton guy so special? Why give him the knowledge of the universe?”**

**“Because he was capable of discovering it on his own,” he said simply. “Because he would not have learned its secrets in time to stop it from falling into the hands of those who would misuse it. Because he has the instinct to wield its power. Because he has the compassion to know he must not.”**

**Cam stared at him quietly for a few seconds, then pointed out, “I’m not a scientist. I’m not smart enough to understand wormholes. Someone points me and I walk over the event horizon, and that’s what I can do with a wormhole.”**

**“That is why you will not be given this knowledge.”**

**“Oh. Cool. Just so we’re clear, because… yeah, I’ve heard what that stuff did to this Crichton guy,” he said, then hesitated before asking, “So why involve me at all? Why show me what the wormholes can do?”**

**“Because there are those in your reality who will discover their power. Because you have the ruthlessness to stop them at any cost. Because you have the goodness in you to understand why you must.”**

**“Yeah, but surely there were better options. Most of my team is more suited to this! Daniel was an ascended, Sam already _gets_ wormholes, T’ealc’s practically the leader of his people! I’m a pilot.”**

**“They are qualified, yes. But can you honestly say that none of them would want to see that power? To build it, to have it, to use as a threat they claim they will never follow through on? Do you honestly believe they would not?”**

**“ _I_ have set off _nukes_.”**

**“And John Crichton used the wormhole weapon,” he replied. “We once thought that was reason enough to remove the knowledge from him.”**

**“And wasn’t it?”**

**“You would use a nuclear weapon. Would you build one?”**

**“I don’t know –”**

**“Would _you_ build one?”**

**He couldn’t answer for a long time. Because he’d used a nuclear warhead. He’d dropped missiles on innocent people. He’d done horrible, unforgivable things. Who the hell was he to pass judgement on anyone?**

**And yet…**

**And yet.**

**If he’d been Einstein, designing the nuclear bomb – if he’d been Sam, or Daniel, or… whoever… with the smarts and talent to build something like that…**

**“No, I wouldn’t build one.”**

**“Some threats cannot be avoided,” he said. “There must always be those willing to fight them.”**

**“You have the power! You can fight your own damn battles!”**

**“We thought we could. But we are not powerful creatures. Our only natural ability is to trap others in a reality of their own making. Our only technology involves wormholes. We would do more harm than good. We have decided to teach.”**

**“Those who cannot do…” he muttered. “Yeah… yeah, okay, I get that.”**

**“And that is why you were shown this reality, and its risks.”**

**Cam sighed and turned his gaze back to the stars.**

 

* * *

 

Sam wasn’t really sure why she stayed. Vala fell asleep around two, curled up on the bed and surrounded by chocolate wrappings. John watched her with that heartbreakingly open look, and Sam really wished she could bring herself to leave.

She should have. If not to go home, then she should have at least headed to her quarters, but something kept her where she was.

Part of it, she had to admit, _was_ attraction. John was the most effortlessly sensual man she’d ever seen, peering out from under his eyebrows, biting or licking his lips, fiddling with his fingers, and every move he made was a smooth slide that drew her eyes, whether it was the tilt of his head or the shift of his legs. She was pretty sure he wasn’t aware of it, but whenever they stopped talking for more than thirty seconds, she found herself thinking things she shouldn’t.

Another part of it was fascination. He was from another reality. And not just one a few degrees away from theirs – he was from a place where everything was different. Where aliens came in a million shapes and colours, where Earth was practically the final frontier to the rest of the Universe, where Cameron Mitchell was a scientist warrior named John Crichton and Vala Mal Doran was his devoted soldier love. She wanted to know all about it.

And part of it, the cold, scientific side of her, knew it was because she wanted to know about wormholes. Even if he didn’t know anymore, she wanted to know what he could remember, how it got taken away from him and why.

It was that part of her that started talking about the stargate.

He shut down at first, staring at her with an unreadable expression, but she pushed on. She explained how Jack and Daniel had been the first to use it, and then how it worked. His eyes flickered slightly when she described the dialling mechanism, and she knew she’d got him.

When she started extrapolating, talking about her own theories about how maybe the wormholes could be used in other ways, he suddenly sharpened, losing his allure and becoming far more like the man he looked like. She even paused for a second to check. “Wait… Cam?”

“No,” he said, barely moving enough to get the word out. “Still me.”

It was kind of weird, but then he’d hardly be the first person she’d met who separated work and life into two completely different personalities. So she cleared her throat and continued, explaining how some of the accidents they’d had made her think about the possibilities of wormholes. Of time travel and different realities. That maybe all wormholes were connected, across all time and space. The stargates just worked on a single wavelength, dialling specific locations on a preset network. If they could build on that, then they could literally go anywhere they wanted. Any _time_ they wanted.

“Time travel’s not safe,” he said suddenly. “You start changing the past and there’s no telling what’ll happen to the future.”

“That’s the theory, but my experience with it has told me that… that history will always try to fix itself,” she said. “It will avoid paradoxes. And – and that’s why the time ripples can’t effect the people who change the past. Because you, as a person, are a singular being, and the time field can’t reach you if you’re not within the blast radius.”

“But that theory implies that you then have to remove yourself from the singularity,” he argued. “By going back in the past, you remove yourself from time. Because the you that will be created following your changes to the past will still exist. But they will have different memories than you, so the you that’s affecting the past is, by the sheer fact of existing, a paradox.”

 “But that’s not my experience,” she said. “I’ve _lived_ this, John. I went back to 1969, I saw history change.”

“Hey, I’ve had time travel too, twice over,” he said. “I’m not saying that you’re wrong, because it matches one example of what I experienced. But that had some serious magic mumbo jumbo going on along with it. You’re talking about straight-up wormhole science.”

“There’s no difference.”

“Yeah, there is. There is science, and then there’s magic. Two completely separate rule books.”

She scoffed. “Magic is just science we don’t understand yet.”

“No it is not!” he cried. “You are comparing sex and unity here; they are two completely separate things. And – no, you know what, no, I’m not getting into that argument. Your whole life is that argument and I do not want to be a part of it,” he said firmly, then pointed at her. “We agree that wormholes are cosmic entities, physical and scientific, completely measurable and, with the right knowledge, controllable, right?”

“Within certain limitations, yes. Chaos theory is somewhat quantifiable,” she agreed. “But there will always be a certain level of instability. Time travel falls into that grey area. When you go back in time, your reality ceases at that point, and you are removed from it, as a singular, complete human. It’s like being a leaf lying on a pond. When you are removed, there are ripples that effect everything around you, but you yourself can’t get wet until you are put back in the pond.”

He grunted like she was causing him physical pain, and the argument continued. It was kind of thrilling, because it was the kind of fight she hadn’t had for a long time, almost since college. And it was the first time she’d been able to use her practical experiences in a theoretical discussion. She’d always been bound by military confidentiality before, or else the people she was talking to didn’t have the academic knowledge that she did. It lasted over twenty minutes before John gave in, citing different realities having different rules of plausibility, which was basically a very nice way of saying ‘let’s agree to disagree’. She didn’t let him have it.

“No, if wormholes are what we’ve agreed them to be, physical and cosmic entities—”

“—measurable and controllable—” he quoted with her, since that was the statement they kept coming back to.

“—then they are the constant that exists across all realities. So that means all realities have to abide by the same basic rules.”

“No,” he said. “No, that’s not right.”

“How is it not right? You are living proof! How else could you get here, from another reality, unless there are fundamental rules which allow our realities to connect? How could they connect if they don’t abide by identical rules?”

“Oh, come on, Sam, universal variables are basic knowledge,” he snapped, and looked around, hands flexing. “I need a pen. Paper.”

“Hold on,” she grumbled, and crawled over to the bedside table. As expected, there was a bible in the bottom drawer, and she went out into the hallway to break the pen off the sign in sheet outside the door. She barely acknowledged the weird look the guard gave her for still being here and looking so grouchy at three in the morning, let alone stealing pens, just slammed the door shut and threw John the pen.

“Okay, so wormholes stretch everywhere. A network like the multiverse nervous system, whatever,” he said, sketching a rough series of lines on the inside of the bible cover. Sam had a brief flash of Cameron wincing when he saw a cross thrown on the ground, but was too caught up in the academic debate to think about sacrilege too much. “This theory only really works if there exists a central point, yes? A prime universe—reality—where the rules are absolute.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Everything else is an offshoot of a prime reality, that’s standard M theory. It’s just the details that get lost.”

“Okay, good, now for the sake of argument, we’re going to agree that neither you nor I live in the prime reality. We’re gonna call that Alpha. Alpha encountered one difference. That was a split. New world. Beta. Probably mostly identical, just one little difference. Then Beta splits. Gamma. Probably still not much to write home about. It splits again. Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, all the way down to Omega, and that’s when things start getting funky. The pyramids are built by aliens. Twenty-first century humans know what a spleen does. All that fun stuff. But go back to Alpha. And the way it split with Beta, it also split into Fehu. Which led to Uruz. Purisaz. All the way to Dagaz. And that seems weird too. Blue ferns, people who have to stitch their faces together to keep their skin on. Different rules. The further out you go, the more different things are. The more things change. The rules get looser, and they split in different ways.”

As he spoke, his hands kept moving, sketching lines and cross hatches, each one identified by a symbol. She recognised them at first – Ancient Greek, then runes, and then something that looked like Ancient, before he started using different symbols altogether.

“The rules change. Gods are higher evolved beings. Magic exists. Technology is the one truth. All are true, but none match, because by this point we’re too far gone from Alpha to recognise anything but the similarities. Humans. Bipedal sentient beings. And the one constant that networks across all of them: wormholes,” he said, and finally his hand stopped, pen frozen at the end of a complex symbol that he just stared at blankly.

Sam frowned, recognising the change in his mood. “John?”

He dropped the pen and bible like they’d burned, and then scrambled to his feet, hands rising to hover near his ears. “No. No, no, no, I left it behind, I’m not interested,” he muttered, pacing away from her. His voice dropped out of her hearing, moving into snarls and desperation with only short half-sentences clear enough for her to follow. “Happy. I’m happy with how things are… Aeryn and Deke… Promised her. _Promised_! No more wormholes. Not interested. No.”

“John,” she said again, louder.

He muttered something under his breath, and when he reached the wall he leaned into it, fists twisting against the plaster. “Chose Moya. Left Earth. I chose that. I chose… oh, god, no, please…”

“Crichton!” she shouted, and as Vala stirred on the bed, he snapped around to look at her, all sharp edges and barely contained fury. She took a half-step back despite herself.

“Oh, no,” Vala muttered, breathing in through her nose and rolling onto her back. “Are you two still fighting over time travel?”

Sam glanced at her, then back up at John. Gone was the sweetly sensual man. The brilliant theorist had disappeared in a flash. All that was left was tightly coiled fury and eyes that did not look right. She stretched her hand toward the bed, signalling for Vala to stay down. “John.”

“What are you?” he demanded lowly. “What are you doing to me?”

“John, I –”

“Don’t lie to me!” he yelled, and then jerked his arm up and out to point at her. The tendons in his arms stood out like wires. “Don’t you dare lie to me.”

“I swear,” she said quietly. “I swear I don’t know what you’re upset about. If you explain it to me, then –”

“ **That would take too long**.”

At the new voice, everyone flinched and looked around, and Vala nearly screamed at the sight of the man stepping out of the shadows of the bathroom. At first, he seemed like a small, thin man on the wrong side of middle-age, but his eyes were completely black, and he radiated power. John bared his teeth, shoulders hunching. “ _Einstein_.”

The man looked at him quietly for a few seconds. “Truth.”

“Has nothing to do with you!” he spat.

“Truth.”

“You _said_ you’d take it away! You said that if I built that thing you’d never let me use the knowledge again!”

“Truth.”

“It was gone! It was all gone! It was done!” he sobbed. Actual tears spilled down his cheeks, and Sam stared at them. She’d never seen Cameron cry. Not once.

“Truth.”

John just stared at him, crying soundlessly.

“Truth.”

He looked away, then back again. “And lies.”

“Truth.”

“Hurts.”

“Truth.”

“Heals.”

“Truth”

“Will set you free!” he yelled. “You tell me, Einstein! What truth do you want me to know?”

He stopped, gaze flickering around the room before returning to him. “We were wrong.”

“What?”

“We thought that we were the only ones who could comprehend wormhole technology,” he said. “We thought that the only way anyone would ever learn it would be if we were to give them the knowledge.”

“Well, you know, thought put a feather in the ground,” he snarled. “What happened? Who screwed you?”

“You did.”

“I did not. The only person who knows, who could’ve…” He looked at Sam. “It was only when I talked to her. When I… she brought it back. I didn’t –”

“You were further along in the wormhole knowledge than you realised,” the stranger said. “And you gave that information to a creature known as Furlow.”

John stilled. “No,” he said, his head jerking around. “No, she didn’t… Aeryn told me about… she – Furlow… Furlow built a replica of my module just from seeing it. And she saw the weapon… _Frell_.”

“We did not put that knowledge in her head,” the stranger said. “We cannot take it out.”

“So kill her!”

“We cannot.”

“You can!” he shouted. “You build weapons to blow up solar systems!”

“You built the Farscape module before you ever met the one you called Jack,” he said. “You learned the knowledge that set Furlow on her way. You, John Crichton. There will be others like you.” He turned his head, and Sam flinched. He was staring at her. “There are already those like you.”

“Sam?” Vala asked quietly, and she shook her head. She had no idea what was going on either.

John was still crying, but he seemed to be under slightly more control now. He closed his eyes, hand thumping against his leg. “S- Y- okay, fine. Fine, it… the secret’s gonna get out, all hell is gonna break loose, what am I supposed to do about it?”

“We cannot touch Furlow. We cannot engage with…” The stranger stared at her for another moment, “those like her. You can.”

“No,” John said firmly, pointing at him. “No, I’m not gonna be your hitman.”

Sam flinched. “What?”

“No!” Vala snapped, rolling off the bed. She came to a stop in front of Sam, arms out protectively. “No one is hurting Sam!”

“Exactly,” John agreed. “And besides, this isn’t my reality. Not my problem. And even if it was, it’s still not my problem. Because we had a deal, Einstein. Wormholes can do whatever they like, and people can do whatever they like with them, because they no longer have anything to do with me. You took the knowledge out of my brain –”

“I can put it back.”

“ _No_!” he yelled. “I don’t want it!”

“That is not truth,” the stranger replied. “All it took was one small push. One simple conversation. And you were trying to understand them again.”

John shook his head hard and turned away, folding his hands behind his neck. “No. No, no, no, don’t… no. Promised Aeryn. Promised _me_.” He spun around again, glaring hard. “I have a family now. A son to protect.”

“This knowledge can keep him safe.”

“The hell it –”

“Time,” the stranger said sharply. “Speeds and stops.”

John froze for a full five seconds, before his arms dropped to hang by his sides.

“How will you keep him safe? How will you hide him amongst the stars?” the stranger asked. “There is a planet that will do this. A planet you cannot reach without our knowledge.”

“Earth,” John whispered, “is only safe when no one can get to it.”

“Then you must ensure no one else can.”

“You don’t…!” He stopped again, his hand curled into claws over his head. “You don’t know! What it is you’re asking me, you don’t know. This isn’t… this isn’t just… wormholes, knowledge, safety of my son, this is… my head. It’s mine. It’s finally all mine. There’s no pain, no pressure, nothing but me,” he whispered, and thumped his chest. “If it comes back… so does he.”

“Perhaps.”

The two men just stared at each other for a few seconds, before John dropped to his knees and then further until his forehead touched the carpet. He stayed there, and Sam looked up at the stranger. “What… what are you asking him to do?”

“That is no concern of yours,” he said, and she clenched her fists.

“That’s not fair. It’s not fair. You can’t just bring him here, torture him like this, in front of us, and then act like we’re not involved!”

“I am asking him to accept the consequences of knowing the truth about wormholes,” he said coldly. “This is what it leads to, Samantha Carter. And yet you persist in your quest for truth.”

“Leave her alone,” John said, barely lifting his head from the carpet. “She doesn’t know anything.”

“She will. Give her time, she will learn.”

“You don’t know that,” he snarled, pushing himself back to his knees. “You didn’t know that with me, you don’t know it with Furlow. They’re just travellers. That’s all they use it for. And Furlow, she just… she’s a capitalist, she’s just… she’s… I’ll… I’ll find her. I’ll find her, I’ll stop her. I will. Just…”

“Will you take back what we took?”

He closed his eyes, but nodded. It looked more painful than anything Sam had ever seen. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll… I’ll do what needs to be done. Hell, I’ll even take Harvey if it helps me keep Deke safe. Aeryn’s gonna kill me,” he added with a humourless laugh. Then he lifted his hand as if to hold off the stranger and staggered to his feet. “Gimme a microt before we go. I gotta… gotta talk to these girls.”

“We will need the transdimensional sifter if you are to return,” the stranger said, and John glared.

“I don’t even know…” He paused, then clenched his eyes shut. “Oh, come on! Five minutes, you couldn’t give me five minutes before starting to put stuff in my head?”

“You are more likely to know where the sifter is located.”

He sighed and turned his back on the man, moving over to stand in front of Vala. He pulled his lips into his mouth, then smiled at her weakly. “Sorry. About all this.”

“What’s going on?” she asked, and he shrugged.

“Life… sucks. My life, specifically,” he said, and reached up to hold her face in his hands. Sam couldn’t see clearly, but he stroked his thumb over her cheek, and the soft look came back. “You are beautiful, no matter who you are. He might never tell you that, and if he can’t see it, he doesn’t deserve you. But you should know it, Vala Mal Doran. You are beautiful.”

“You only like me for my looks,” she said, trying to laugh, but his smile was kind.

“You deserve better than that. Hold out for it, okay?” He waited until she nodded, and then pulled her into his shoulder. As he hugged her, he looked up to meet Sam’s gaze. “I know about wormholes. Knew, actually. Will know. Not right now, but it’s coming back. Soon, I’ll know how to do terrible, horrible, apocalyptic things with wormholes. That kind of power is… wrong. No one should ever have that.”

She smiled helplessly. A lot of people said that about nuclear weapons too, but they all had those, now.

“That’s why they took it away from me,” he said, as he let Vala go. She leaned into his shoulder instead, clinging to the gentle strength he was currently providing. How he was managing it when he’d literally broken down only a few minutes prior, Sam couldn’t understand, but she was lost in his eyes all the same. “But… the knowledge is out there for people to find, so… apparently these guys want me fighting fire with fire. My versions of the Ancients,” he explained wryly. “They’re a little more liberal with their um… interference.”

“I wish you could tell me more,” she said, and pushed her hands in her back pockets. “Why’d they bring you here?”

“Ahh, well… probably a few reasons. I wouldn’t have had that discussion we had with anyone back home,” he said, and then sighed again. “And he needed to get me away from Aeryn and Chiana and… all the people who would’ve stopped me from saying yes. And… and he probably wanted to show you what the knowledge did to me. You’re smart, Sam. You’re gonna figure it out one day, and… and when that happens, it’s gonna be up to you to decide what you do with the knowledge.”

“I’ll do what you did,” she said. “I’ll do what needs to be done.”

He stared at her, a small, horrible smile twisting his lips. “No, Sam,” he said, and gently pried Vala off. “I don’t think you will. But that’s your problem. I got my own reality to deal with. Ain’t that right, Einstein?”

The stranger only looked at them, patient and waiting. John scoffed and took the last step forward to bring himself into her personal space.

His eyes were still red-rimmed, tears wet on his cheeks. But as he chewed his lip and stared into her eyes, all of that faded away. Once again, he was the easy, comfortable man she’d found herself attracted to all night.

He chuckled at whatever was on her face.

“It ain’t me, honey,” he said. “I know you don’t believe in magic, so maybe believe that knowledge shines through. Even when it’s hidden. Everybody only loves me for my brain.”

She blinked, and he laughed, then gently leaned down and closed his lips over hers.

Just like the rest of him, it was soft and slow, but firmly reassuring. She almost melted into it, but he pulled away before he could, pressing his lips together in a guilty, sympathetic smile.

“I need the ball,” he whispered. “In your pocket.”

She blinked, then tore her gaze away and looked down, taking the artefact out to hand it over. Once he took it, he used the hand holding it to brush a knuckle against her cheek, then turned away.

“Let’s get this show on the road.”

The stranger nodded, and there was a flash of blue light, before John stumbled. Sam and Vala jerked forward, and that was all the distraction it took for the stranger to disappear.

 

* * *

 

**The argument was loud and predictable, and ended with Aeryn and Crichton kneeling together in the middle of their quarters, clinging to each other and crying.**

**By the next day, Crichton’s arms and reams of paper spread all over maintenance bay one were covered in equations and he was found curled in a ball in the middle of it, visibly hating himself but calm, because he’d finally found a way to keep his son safe from the people who would use him.**

**And as Chiana sang little D’Argo to sleep, Aeryn wrapped herself around her husband, and swore to keep him safe in return.**

 

* * *

 

“No, it was amazing,” Cam said as he shovelled more food into his mouth. “These aliens, Jackson, they were just incredible. Just on this one ship, there were like five different species, and the ship itself! The ship itself was alive! Oh, hey girls.”

Sam and Vala nodded as they joined the table. They’d both slept in late after reporting in to General Landry that morning, the late night and stressful end exhausting them both. Cam, however, seemed even more energised than normal, and had apparently been gushing about his adventures in the other reality to anyone that would listen.

“Only about half of these people even looked remotely human. One of them had an extra eye, that was Nianti. And there was Chiana, who… I mean, first of all, she was grey, like her skin, which is weird enough, but the way she held herself was like…” He paused to contort his back for a few seconds before going back to his food. “And the only one I thought actually was human turned out to be this whole other race. Cold-blooded, can you believe it? And she looked _exactly_ like Vala.”

“Aeryn,” Vala surmised, and Cam stopped eating long enough to look at her. She frowned, fingers tightening around her coffee mug. “John told us about her. Aeryn.”

“Yeah,” he said, and for a few seconds, it was awkward. He glanced at Daniel, then coughed and asked, “She uh… she and John apparently have a real… thing.”

“Yeah,” she agreed.

Daniel raised his eyebrows, utterly incapable of knowing exactly what Vala and Cam had seen in their counterparts’ lovers to affect them so badly, but Sam gave him a firm warning look to keep him silent until they were ready to talk again.

 “Anyway, it was… amazing. Really cool,” Cam continued, obviously forcing himself a little now. “Wish I’d been able to stick around for more than twenty-four hours.”

“So did anything happen, while you were there?” asked Sam. “We had that world’s version of an Ancient here, for a little while. You see anything like that?”

“Ancient?” he repeated, looking up with wide eyes. “No. No, didn’t see anything like that.”

“Really? Well, did they tell you anything?” she asked. “Wormholes are apparently a big thing, with John… That come up at all?”

He shovelled another forkful of food into his mouth and chewed slowly, watching her from under furrowed brows. On anyone else, it might have seemed like a delaying tactic, but she knew Cam better than that. It was just that like any proper soldier, he prized food where he could get it, and his expression was hard by default. When he swallowed, he smiled, as innocent and full of excitement as ever. “No. I dunno about John, but um… wormholes only came up when I explained how the stargates work, and uh… yeah, apparently they’re kind of a taboo topic. Sorry, Sam.”

“Oh, no, that kind of fits,” she said. “Shame though. John apparently knows a fair bit about them. Would’ve been nice to learn.”

“Hm,” he said, and went back to his meal, his expression relaxing back into its normal frown as he watched her. “So you didn’t learn anything either?”

“Just about the possibilities,” she said, already thinking about the simulations she could run.

“Possibilities,” Cam repeated quietly, but when she looked at him again, he was focussed on his food.

She smiled and gently nudged Vala, who tried to cheer up, but with Daniel beside her, looking as uninterested as ever, all she managed was a weak chuckle.

And so things continued on. Just another day at Stargate Command.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The 48 is a collection of unfinished fics saved to my harddrive. This one is less unfinished and more... left alone, because of how late to the party I am, and my understanding that I'm not an SG-1 fan, so I shouldn't really be playing in the sandbox. But hey. I hope you get some interest out of it.


End file.
